Republicans AGAIN lie about reconciliation

In a Feb. 23 USA Today op-ed, Republicans wrote that the dastardly Dems were planning to use "special rules to circumvent bipartisan Senate opposition" and "jam this bill through Congress." But that's A LIE, and they know it. Why? Because they were actually in the Senate on Dec. 24 when Obama's bill passed. Sixty yea votes, 39 nay—which is nine votes more than the Dems needed, at least according to the U.S. Constitution. (A few weeks earlier, the House passed its own version of the bill, 220–215.)

Furthermore, the opposition in the Senate was hardly bipartisan: every one of the 39 senators who voted against the bill was a Republican, and every one of the 60 senators who voted for it was a Democrat.

So Obama doesn't need to resort to reconciliation to pass health-care reform. He's already passed it. What he does need it for, however, is passing the revisions necessary to get the House and the Senate to agree on a single version of the legislation.

This means that after the House passes the Senate version of the bill, the Senate will approve what's known as a "sidecar"—a small package of budget-related tweaks designed to make the House happy. These revisions represent the only part of health-care reform that Senate Democrats are seeking to pass through reconciliation, i.e., with a simple majority rather than a supermajority. This is less ambitious than the usual reconciliation process, which typically applies to entire bills, not more.

As it turns out, every major health-care innovation of the last three decades has been done through reconciliation, including COBRA, the popular law that allows people to keep their health insurance after losing their jobs, and the Children's Health Insurance Program, which, together with Medicaid, provides access to health care for one third of American children.

And remember: these bills were passed in their entirety through reconciliation. Obamacare, on the other hand, passed the Senate with a 60-vote supermajority; it's only the sidecar that Democrats plan to pass with less.

Reconciliation has never been used for legislation this substantial? Really?
Last month, Repbulican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said reconciliation "has never been used for this kind of major systemic reform"; later, Republican Lamar Alexander told ABC's This Week that "there's never been anything of this size and magnitude and complexity run through the Senate in this way."

But THAT IS A LIE, as reconciliation has not only been used to pass major health-care initiatives, it's actually been used to pass major initiatives of all sorts, including the Republicans' favorite "major systemic reform" of the last 20 years (the 1996 welfare-reform bill) and at least two bills (Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts) that cost about twice as much over 10 years ($1.8 trillion) as health-care reform is estimated to cost ($950 billion).