Reconciliation

It is amazing how few reporters understand what the budget reconciliation process is: Either how it works, or what it's traditionally been used for, or what Democrats are proposing to use it for. That confusion creates comical exchanges like this one, where Bob Schieffer and Politico listened to Kent Conrad argue for a reconciliation strategy and walked away believing he'd thrown cold water on the idea.

To say a few more words on the double-standards that afflict Democrats with regard to the deficit, take a look at how Bush passed his tax cuts. Since he didn't have 60 votes for the hefty package he wanted, he used the budget reconciliation process. This was, to observers, a surprise: the idea behind budget reconciliation was that it would make it easier for Congress to do the hard work of deficit reduction.

Among the odder arguments Republicans are making against the reconciliation process is that the process should only be used for bipartisan bills, and since they refuse to vote for health-care reform, Democrats can't give their package of fixes an up-or-down vote.

Mark Schmitt, whose years on the Senate Finance Committee gave him an impressive understanding of legislative arcana, has written a detailed post on the history, limits and technicalities of the reconciliation process. His conclusion, in particular, is spot-on.

Fox News has started calling the reconciliation process "the nuclear option," which implies that Bush's two tax cuts -- both of which went through reconciliation -- were Little Boy and Fat Man, respectively. Nancy Pelosi has a more apt term: "Majority rule." And as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities explains in a new report, there's nothing uncommon about that. Emphasis theirs:

People say the media is more viscerally sympathetic to Democrats than Republicans. But working in the other direction is the fact that Republicans understand the media much better than Democrats do. Take the reconciliation process. The media is giving blanket coverage to this "controversial" procedure being used by the Democrats. But using reconciliation for a few fixes and tweaks isn't controversial historically, and it's not controversial procedurally. It's only controversial because Republicans are saying it is. Which is good enough, as it turns out.

The thinkable has happened, and the Senate parliamentarian has ruled that the president must sign the health-care reform bill before the House and Senate can act on a reconciliation package.

I don't think, as Marc Ambinder says, that the "big question mark [in health-care reform] is reconciliation." The people I've spoken with seem pretty unanimous in the belief that if Democrats go to the reconciliation process in health-care reform, they're trying to craft a small win out of a large loss.