Reconciliation isn't the 'nuclear option' but it has passed tough laws in past 50 years

[steven johnson]

If you look at the use of budget reconciliation to pass major legislation, the score is Republicans 14, Democrats 5.

http://www.congressmatters.com/storyonly/2010/2/24/2120/-Reconciliation-UsageRepublicans-14,-Democrats-5

While republicans accused the Democrats of evading the will of the voters(i.e., republicans)they have used budget reconciliation much more often to get major legislation passed. Mitch McConnell voted in favor of the Bush tax cuts in 2003 and 2005 using reconciliation and supported reconciliation to pass legislation that would have allowed oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

http://mediamatters.org/research/201002210007

To Republicans, it's nothing short of dishonorable that President Barack Obama would use the Senate budget reconciliation process (which doesn't allow filibusters) to try to pass health care reform.

But look at the Senate roll call on the conference report for the 1996 welfare reform bill, the most momentous piece of social legislation to become law in the last 20 years. The bill's formal name was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 . It was called that because it passed the Senate through budget reconciliation, even though the bill's purpose ("ending welfare as we know it") was only peripherally about trimming the federal budget. Yet McConnell voted for the bill. So did Hatch, Grassley, Snowe, and every other Republican in the Senate. So, for that matter, did most Democrats.

Reconciliation has been used to raise taxes. It's been used to cut taxes. It was used (by a Republican-controlled Senate) to create COBRA, the program that compels employers to allow departing employees to buy into their health plan for 18 months. COBRA stands for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986 , signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. Reconciliation was used several times to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor during the 1990s and the early aughts. It was used (again, by a Republican-controlled Senate) to create in 1997 the beneficial Children's Health Insurance Program and the wasteful privatization experiment known as Medicare Advantage. It's been used repeatedly to set federal policy regarding higher education loans and grants. "It's done almost every Congress," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Feb. 23, "and the ones that used it more than anyone else." (For a complete list of all reconciliation bills signed into law between 1980 and 2008, click here.) In a Feb. 10 essay for the New England Journal of Medicine, Henry Aaron, a veteran health policy expert at the Brookings Institution, argued,


Unreconciled -- The GOP resolves to forget how it passed welfare reform

[depakid]

1. "...the score is Republicans 14, Democrats 5."

That about sums it up.