While he offers nothing I would consider profound, Alabama Representative Robert Aderholt has joined the fray and let his feelings about reconciliation be known. Apparently, this has NEVER been done before:
The bottom line is that Congress should not be considering this very powerful piece of legislation through a controversial “reconciliation” procedural measure. It’s not the way that Congress was designed to pass crucial bills like health care reform, and I hope the American people get their wish by seeing this measure defeated.The GOP has begun to parse it's words a little bit (as evidenced by Rep. Aderholt's column) as Democrats have begun to let it be known all the things that the GOP has passed through reconciliation through the years. E.J. Dionne also points out some crucial things about this:
All of the Republican claims were helpfully gathered in one place by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, in an op-ed in Tuesday's Washington Post. Right off, the piece was wrong on a core fact. Hatch accused the Democrats of trying to, yes, "ram through the Senate a multitrillion-dollar health-care bill."No. The health care bill passed the Senate last December with 60 votes under the normal process. The only thing that would pass under a simple majority vote would be a series of amendments that fit comfortably under the "reconciliation" rules established to deal with money issues. Near the very end of his article, Hatch concedes that reconciliation would be used for "only parts" of the bill. But then why didn't he say that in the first place?
Hatch quotes Sens. Robert Byrd and Kent Conrad, both Democrats, as opposing the use of reconciliation on health care. What he doesn't say is that Byrd's comment from a year ago was about passing the entire bill under reconciliation, which no one is proposing to do. As for Conrad, he made clear to The Washington Post's Ezra Klein this week that it's perfectly appropriate to use reconciliation "to improve or perfect the package," which is exactly what Obama is suggesting.
