NicolasC's diary discusses the good editiorial in today's New York Times that spells out all the reasons why the Democrats will need to ditch the deluded and clearly failed attempts at bipartisanship and use budget reconciliation in the Senate to get health care reform accomplished. The editorial also points out the central role of the Senate Parliamentarian if the Democrats are to succeed in using the reconciliation rule. Just who is the Senate Parliamentarian? He is Alan Frumin, and you may soon become much more familiar with his name.
Alan Frumin has worked in the Senate Parliamentarian's Office since 1977. He went to college at Colgate, has a law degree from Georgetown and has co-authored a book on Senate rules. He is married to Jill Meryl, a lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission. You will normally see Frumin sitting below the Presiding Officer on the Senate dais.
As noted in The Hill and Bloomberg News, Frumin was appointed Senate Parliamentarian in 2001, after his predecessor, Robert Dove was fired by then-Majority Leader Trent Lott after the Republicans got upset by several of his rulings.
Parliamentarians know their job can be perilous.
Dove was fired in 2001 (Frumin replaced him) after Republican senators, then in the majority, disputed several of his rulings. Dove, who was hired by GOP senators, had decided that parts of a Republican tax cut plan couldn’t be passed through the reconciliation process because to do so would have enlarged the federal deficit.
Although Frumin was appointed by the Republicans, he does not appear to be a Republican political hack. He has pissed off both Republicans and Democrats with his rulings.
Frumin was criticized in 2003, first by Republicans after he ruled that they couldn’t use reconciliation rules to consider a $350 billion tax cut bill. A few weeks later, he piqued Democrats by dismissing as out of order several of their amendments to a Defense Department authorization bill.
As with many government lifers who have survived numerous administrations from both sides of the aisle, Frumin appears to take his job seriously and make his decisions based on parliamentary rules and not on polticial considerations, according to those who know him well.
"He’s known for being substantively rigorous and he understands the value of precedent," said Stan Collender, a partner at Qorvis Communications and a former Democratic budget aide. "He’s not likely to just come up with a ruling that’s completely off the wall. He’s known to do his job really well and tries to call it pretty straight."
Nobody knows for sure how Frumin would rule on the Democrats' efforts to use reconciliation to get a health care reform bill passed, but Frumin's predecessor offered a few clues to Bloomberg News:
Dove said Frumin would probably drop anything the Congressional Budget Office said wouldn’t affect the budget. Even a provision that affects the budget may be deleted if Frumin concludes "the real reason that it’s there is not for its budgetary implications but for its policy implications," Dove said.
As a hypothetical example, he said that as parliamentarian he would kill a provision barring the government from financing abortions because saving money wasn’t the reason it was put in a bill.
Lawmakers "get really ticked off" about such rulings, Dove said. "I made enemies by the score," he said, recalling he once dropped 250 provisions from a bill.
So, it appears that the CBO would also play an important role in the reconciliation approach.
Although it looks like Frumin could play a critical role in health care reform, it should be pointed out that the Senate Parliamentarian is strictly an advisory role. Frumin's role is to advise the Presiding Officer of the Senate on how to respond to inquiries and motions from Senators. As noted in wikipedia, the Presiding Officer is in "no way required to follow their advice, though they almost always do so."
Chris Bowers over at Open Left takes serious issue with the idea that the fate of this country's entire health care reform will be left up to an obscure government official appointed by Republicans:
It is bullshit to claim that Senate Democrats have no choice but to accept the decisions of a single, unelected guy who was hired by Republicans in order to give Republicans favorable interpretations of Senate procedure. That is just a pathetic example of abdicating any responsibility and a declaration that there is a complete lack of Democratic leadership over the Senate. Oh, I know we were elected by the American people, but we have no choice but to follow the rulings of this one unelected guy who Republicans hired to give them favorable rulings.
Absolute. Bullshit.
The fact is that Democrats only need 50 votes, plus the Vice-President, to sustain a ruling from the chair that they are ignoring the interpretation of Senate Parliamentarian and moving forward regardless of what he says. That is a fact. They are not powerless before the unelected, Republican-hired Parliamentarian.
Based on my current understanding of the Senate Parliamentarian's role and on the critical importance of health care reform, I tend to agree with Bowers. However, I can see how ignorning the Parliamentarian's ruling would be an even riskier strategy, politically, for the Democrats than the already risky strategy of using reconciliation. But for an issue as vital as this one to so many people's lives, I'd say it's worth the risk.