Republican Senators apparently think the House would be wise to make the Senate go first, too. Which they helpfully tell us inadvertently, while trying to look cunning and devious:
Senior Senate GOP leadership aides have settled on a new strategy that, they hope, will stall or kill the Dem health reform push: They are going to use the arcane “Byrd rule” to try to bleed the reconciliation fix to death and ensure that it never passes.
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Presuming the House passes the Senate bill, the House will then pass a reconciliation fix to the bill, after which the Senate will then try to pass that fix, too.
At this point Senate GOPers will repeatedly invoke the Byrd rule to ask the parliamentarian to strip individual provisions (ones fixing this or that in the original bill) out of the fix, on the grounds that they are policy fixes. If individual provisions are stripped, it would change the Senate’s version of the overall fix.
That would force the House to vote on it again and again, stalling the process further.
But wait, there's more!
There’s a larger game plan here. By making it clear they will do their best to tie reconciliation in procedural knots, Republicans are hoping to frighten House Dems into believing reconciliation is doomed. If House Dems are persuaded that the fix later will fail, they will be less likely to pass the original Senate bill in the first place, pehaps killing it.
Well, there are a couple things you can do about this. The simplest, from my perspective, is to pass the reconciliation bill first. That way, even if reconciliation does turn out to be doomed (it's really shouldn't be), then at least the House has the opportunity to vote on passing the Senate's main bill with a clear understanding of the playing field. Why the House wouldn't insist on giving itself that opportunity, I have no idea. But if there's an opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot, you can be sure they'll take it, and probably shoot your feet too, if you stand too close.
Another thing they can do about it is, well, follow normal procedure. I don't know of any reason why this plan would "force the House to vote on it again and again. If the House started the reconciliation process by sending the Senate a bill and the Senate were later forced to amend that bill, the House wouldn't see it again until the Senate had passed its version. And at that point, the House could just pass that version, and the Senate would never get it back. This "plan" appears to assume that every time a provision is struck by the Byrd rule, the bill freezes in the Senate and goes back to the House, as opposed to continuing in the Senate until it's finally passed. Why that is, I'm not sure.
Finally, I can think of one other issue, which is that reconciliation bills are routinely vetted with the Senate parliamentarian ahead of time in order to identify possible Byrd rule issues, and either prepare for how it looks like the rulings will come down, or tweak the bill so that the objections are dealt with before debate even begins. The likelihood that Republicans will discover a significant number of possible issues that the parliamentarian will have missed is probably pretty slim.
But one opportunity for making mischief remains, regarding points of order, at least. If the Republican plan is simply to make objections that the parliamentarian has already informally decided are without foundation, they can in theory create delays simply by playing dumb and pretending they don't know how the parliamentarian will rule.
In other words, even though everyone knows what the outcome will be, Republicans could still insist they have the right to make their points of order, to have the chair rule on them, and if the chair declines to sustain them on the advice of the parliamentarian, the Republicans would then appeal the ruling of the chair, forcing a vote either to sustain the ruling or move to table the appeal. Such votes would be decided by simple majority, but absent a motion seeking to limit such points of order as dilatory (which is technically possible, I suppose), it's possible that the Republicans could gum up the works, at least for a while. I'm unsure whether the exercise could continue once the statutorily-mandated 20 hour time limit on debate ran out, though Republicans have also indicated that they'd seek to push past that limit by offering just as many amendments to the bill as they're now threatening points of order.
The issue of amendments is perhaps simpler to deal with. Or at least, Democrats have options, which I mentioned in the above-linked story:
There's an October 3, 1977 precedent from when Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) was Majority Leader, wherein faced with an exploitation of an old cloture rule loophole that allowed Senators to file the same sort of endless stream of amendments, even after cloture had already been invoked, he addressed the chair with this point of order, which was sustained by the chair:
I make the point that when the Senate is operating under cloture the Chair is required to take the initiative under rule XXII to rule out of order all amendments which are dilatory or which on their face are out of order.
The point having been sustained (and an appeal of the ruling tabled, which requires a simple majority vote), Byrd used his right of preferential recognition as Majority Leader to call up all the rest of the amendments one at a time, whereupon the chair ruled each of them out of order on its own motion. (Source - warning, PDF)
I would argue that if that point of order can be sustained for the post-cloture environment, when debate is limited to 30 hours, surely it should be sustained for the reconciliation environment, when debate is limited to just 20.
Whether or not a similar strategy could be employed against points of order, I couldn't say. It seems somewhat more difficult to justify just because we normally consider points of order to be something Senators have a clearer right to offer. But it becomes nearly impossible to believe they're offering them in good faith and from solid ground if they're offering dozens or hundreds of such points of order, as they previously threatened with amendments, especially when you consider that there have only been 53 straight-up Byrd Rule points of order raised in the entire 25 year history of the rule (source: PDF).
We'll have to see how many supposed objections they think they can credibly raise to what should be a relatively small bill (though I wouldn't put it past Democrats to consider bulking it up a little). And we'll have to see how much credibility the media affords them if they begin making repetitive or nonsensical objections. Last but not least, we may have to see how willing Democrats are to deal harshly with buffoonery. The odds on that are rarely particularly good. But with the gauntlet already thrown down, another deadline established, and Members already sick to death of dealing with this, they may yet surprise us, even if it's motivated by the never-surprising drive to adjourn.