Senate parliamentarian rules that bill must pass before reconciliation can be used

Thu, 03/11/2010 - 17:14 EDT  in
 

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.

In the Democrats' Senate Caucus meeting today, Kent Conrad apparently argued that this left the Democrats in an even stronger moral position. The reconciliation rider fixes unpopular elements of the health-care bill: the Nebraska deal, the Florida deal, the excise tax and so forth. If Republicans figure out some nuclear level of obstruction that could actually derail the reconciliation process, then they will effectively own the worst elements of the Senate bill, and Democrats can just spend their time hammering Republican obstructionism that has so lost touch with reality that they'd rather keep legislation they're against than let Democrats fix it. Or so goes the argument.

Meanwhile, the hypocrisy that the state-based Senate and the district-based House have embraced in their ferocious denunciations of these deals gets a nice showcase in Rep. Mike Capuano's list of complaints with the health-care bill. Most of them boil down to the need for Massachusetts to have more Nebraska-like deals.


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