Research

Not long ago, a United States Senator from Illinois took to the floor to rail against the parliamentary tactic of reconciliation, declaring:

Under the rules, the reconciliation process does not permit that [full and fair] debate. Reconciliation is therefore the wrong place for policy changes … In short, the reconciliation process appears to have lost its proper meaning. A vehicle designed for deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility has been hijacked to facilitate reckless deficits and unsustainable debt.

That Senator was Barack Obama, and the year was 2005.  But this afternoon, President Obama is expected to call for Democrats to hijack the reconciliation process to ram through their $2.5 trillion government-run health care experiment.  And while the measure under consideration in 2005, the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, made tough budget choices for which the reconciliation process was intended, the health care bill clearly does not.

In fact, the more one considers the Democrats’ plans to use reconciliation to pass their massive government-run health care bill, the more one realizes that, as Obama warned in his floor speech, “the reconciliation process appears to have lost its proper meaning.”  President Obama will try to claim that Democrats will be following tradition by using reconciliation. But the facts show that reconciliation is traditionally not a partisan tactic:

• Since the process was placed in the Senate rules, 19 reconciliation measures have become law.
• Of those, 12, or nearly two-thirds, passed with more than 60 votes and five passed with bipartisan support.
• Just two were passed along party lines – President Bill Clinton’s massive 1993 tax hike and the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 that then-Senator Obama opposed.

President Obama has chosen not to listen to Americans, and will attempt to push through his government-run health care experiment with ramming speed, just one of the many things you can still bet on when the president announces his “new way forward” this afternoon.