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Do you understand the details of the reconciliation process? If you do, could you shed some light on it? It was my understanding that the point of having two ve
by coffeemug 17y ago
Do you understand the details of the reconciliation process? If you do, could you shed some light on it? It was my understanding that the point of having two versions of the legislation that later go into reconciliation is to avoid filibusters for controversial parts that might increase federal budget (such as public option). This would mean that the democrats could easily include public option into the final bill with 50% + 1 votes, which would almost certainly happen. If this is the case, why do you say the final version will look more like the senate version of the bill?
- sethg 17y agoNot every pill is The Pill, not every man is The Man, and not every reconciliation between the houses of Congress is Reconciliation, so to speak. Hence your confusion. A bill passed under the reconciliation rules cannot be filibustered, but only budget-related resolutions that meet certain very strict criteria can be passed through the reconciliation process. Some folks were making a lot of noise along the lines of “if this gets filibustered we’ll just pass something through reconciliation”, but that hasn’t happened and at this juncture I don’t think it will happen. What’s happening now is a very different process: negotiators from the House and Senate are going to try to come up with a single bill text that can still get a majority of the house and sixty votes in the Senate. They still need sixty Senators because the bill that emerges from these negotiations is governed by the same cloture rules as a normal bill.