Faced with hardening Republican opposition to health care reform, Democrats will likely try to ram through a health care bill with just 51 votes, instead of the usual 60, when the Senate reconvenes next week.
Such a move, which could be achieved through a parliamentary move called reconciliation, would spare Democrats from having to water down the $1 trillion bill in order to appease moderates in the party who oppose the bill’s cost and who question its centerpiece provision, the “public option.”
Using reconciliation, however, would result in a weaker bill because of special rules put in place by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., that would allow the chamber’s 41 Republicans to block crucial components.
A health care bill passed solely by Democrats might also have less staying power because Republicans are set on reversing it if they regain control of Congress and the White House.
“If they somehow manage to get the votes and get enough Democrats to walk the plank and commit political suicide,” Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said Monday on Fox News, “in the next Congress I’ll be chairman of the committee and we’ll repeal it.”
Democrats are acutely aware that any health care reform they pass will be vulnerable if they do it without Republican support.
President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, passed by Republicans using reconciliation earlier in the decade, were saddled with a sunset provision that will force them to expire next year.
“The Bush tax cuts were made as difficult as possible by the Democrats,” Robert Dove, who was the Senate parliamentarian at the time, told The Examiner. “If Democrats go the reconciliation route on health care, Republicans will make it as difficult as possible because they feel they are being railroaded.”
Republicans can wreak havoc on the Democratic health bill using the Byrd rule, which would reinstate the 60-vote requirement on any provisions that add to the deficit or, in the judgment of the Senate parliamentarian, create policy.
Hoping to avoid this scenario, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., has been working with a handful of Republicans on a bipartisan plan that would bypass the government health insurance option in favor of the creation of a health insurance cooperative. But aides said Monday that Senate Democratic leaders were losing faith in a potential Baucus deal.
The Senate Democratic leaders and their staffs have been meeting for weeks with Senate Parliamentarian Alan Frumin to try to determine which parts of the massive bill they can pass using reconciliation. A spokesman for Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he “continues to hope for a bipartisan bill, but if not he will continue to explore other options.”
