House Speaker Paul Ryan wants to remake America in his dystopian image, and he's one election away from doing it. He's got the tool—now he only needs the White House. The tool is budget reconciliation, a procedural sledgehammer than can be used for good—providing health insurance to 20 million people—or evil. You know Ryan, so you know which direction he'll go.
If Donald Trump is elected president and Republicans hold onto Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan is bluntly promising to ram a partisan agenda through Capitol Hill next year, with Obamacare repeal and trillion-dollar tax cuts likely at the top of the list. And Democrats would be utterly defenseless to stop them.[…]
Ryan peeled back the curtain on his strategy at a news conference after a reporter suggested he would struggle to implement his ambitious agenda next year. After all, it was noted, Republicans are certain to lack the 60 votes needed in the Senate to break Democratic filibusters on legislation. So Ryan gave a minitutorial on congressional rules and the bazooka in his pocket for the assembled reporters.
“This is our plan for 2017,” Ryan said, waving a copy of his “Better Way” policy agenda. “Much of this you can do through budget reconciliation.” He explained that key pieces are “fiscal in nature,” meaning they can be moved quickly through a budget maneuver that requires a simple majority in the Senate and House. “This is our game plan for 2017,” Ryan said again to the seemingly unconvinced press.
He's got it all figured out, and he doesn't need a 60-vote majority in the Senate to achieve it. He does have to have a Republican majority, however, and a Mitch McConnell willing to go along with the plan. If both the House and Senate pass identical budgets, they can include instructions that allow the resolution to be privileged and disallows the filibuster. Budget reconciliation only works on bills that are related to spending or taxing—like Ryan's trillion-dollar tax cuts and repealing Obamacare.
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There are elements to Obamacare that could possibly be protected, but without the spending parts, the law would collapse. Ryan has taken a dry run at this already, with the Obamacare repeal bill that made it to President Obama's desk and was vetoed. But they laid all the groundwork for doing it with that bill. It's worth mentioning that bill included a one-year defunding of Planned Parenthood. Ryan knows exactly how to structure the bill to move it.
Of course it's not just Obamacare and Planned Parenthood. It's also Medicare and Medicaid and possibly Social Security being slashed. It's food stamps and housing assistance. When Ryan says "the big things—poverty, the debt crisis, the economy, health care—these things are stuck in divided government, and that's why we think a unified Republican government's the way to go," he means it. Unified government for him means Republicans in control and smashing the entire social insurance system as we know it—and enacting massive tax cuts for the wealthy.
He's deadly serious. Which ratchets up the danger level to a Trump presidency and a Republican Senate majority even higher.