Neither Nuclear Nor Unprecedented: GOP Outrage Over Reconciliation Is A Lie

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Today’s major political story does not matter.  Today, Democrats begin the process of reconciliation on the long delayed and embattled Health Care Bill.  This is a non-event.  Certainly the bill itself is significant and its passage or defeat will have lasting and serious consequences for the United States, but reconciliation as a parliamentary procedure?  Unimportant… or at least unremarkable. 

Despite Republican fantasies to the contrary, Reconciliation is neither an unprecedented parliamentary trick on the part of the Democrats nor even all that uncommon a resolution to the problem of a threatened filibuster.  The Senate has used the procedure numerous times since it was first introduced in the 1970s, perhaps most relevantly and obviously in the mid 1980s to approve the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) which contained health-care related provisions now known by the same name.  Curiously, present day Republicans have been nearly silent on the conspicuously named COBRA legislation and even more tight lipped about the fact that it bares Ronald Reagan’s signature. Passing health-care reform by way of reconciliation?  That’s so 1986.

Yet the GOP continues its hyperbolic hysteria, wailing on about how the Democrats are trying to “jam this bill down the country’s throat” as if the Democrats were not elected to commanding majorities in both houses of Congress, as if the American public is not evenly divided on the issue of health-care, and as if the electorate does not trust the Democrats to handle this issue by a 10 point margin.  Republicans have labeled the reconciliation procedure “the Nuclear Option” and the extremists at Fox News have labored tirelessly to confuse the apocalyptic phrase with the Budget Reconciliation Procedure, presently underway.

These are not the same thing.

Budget Reconciliation dates 1974 and has been invoked on numerous occasions, mostly by Republicans, to pass contentious legislation which is often (but not always, as demonstrated above) limited to budgetary matters.  Budget Reconciliation has been used 19 times since 1980 and the overwhelming majority of the bills it was invoked upon bare the signature of a Republican President.  The “Nuclear Option,” in contrast, is a permanent revision to the rules of the US Senate which Republicans threatened to use during the Bush Presidency to stop a Democratic Filibuster of certain judicial nominees.   The revision, which could have been proposed and voted upon by a simple majority, would have declared the Filibuster to be unconstitutional, thereby eliminating the practice altogether from the US Senate.

To recap, had Republicans gone forward with the nuclear option in 2005, they would not have been able to filibuster the health care reform bill or anything else the Senate Democrats proposed; the filibuster would simply have ceased to exist.  On the other hand, neither this nor any of the twenty-some prior uses of reconciliation has or will prevent other filibusters in this or future sessions of the United States Senate.

Today reconciliation goes forward and the Republican Party will pretend that it is a looming and catastrophic threat to the Senate and American Democracy.

They’re lying to you.