Much of the attention on last week's House action was the convoluted Afghanistan war funding vote, and with it the "cat food commission" vote, in which the House locked itself into voting on any recommendations made by the commission and approved by the Senate.
Related to the cat food commission, Hoyer had announced the decision of House leadership to not pass a budget resolution this year, arguing that "It isn't possible to debate and pass a realistic, long-term budget until we've considered the bipartisan commission's deficit-reduction plan." Ezra points out the problem in that: no budget resolution, no reconciliation instructions. No reconciliation instructions, no possibility of passing critical legislation with fewer than 60 votes.
The 2010 elections, however, are likely to return a much-reduced Democratic Senate majority. As the situation stands, Democrats couldn't pass unemployment-insurance legislation with 59 votes, because they couldn't quite get to 60. If they have only 52 members in their caucus, they really have no chance. That's why setting down reconciliation instructions now was so important: It was their best chance to actually govern next year.
Senate Democrats are hanging this one on the House. "It was our intent in a budget resolution to include those instructions," Sen. Debbie Stabenow told me. "And we passed such a resolution out of committee." House aides retort that they were told Senate Democrats didn't have the 51 votes necessary to pass the budget on the floor, and in any case, it's not their fault that the Senate is paralyzed by the filibuster. In fact, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called just today for an end to the filibuster.
But the fact remains: By not passing a budget with reconciliation instructions this year, Democrats are setting themselves up for further gridlock and failure next year. If you can't get 51 votes for a budget when you have 59, you sure can't get 60 votes for controversial legislation when you only have 52.
That's true, and you could look at this as a massive failure of planning for the future on the part of House leadership. Or, it could be the House trying to force the Senate's hand on filibuster reform. By taking away the possibility of passing key legislation via reconciliation, Pelosi and Hoyer have made that reform absolutely essential. If, that is, they intend to actually do any governing between now and 2012.