In the House, Republicans are going to do their damnedest to derail the health insurance reform bill by trying to force a vote on whether Pelosi can use a self-executing rule.
"If passed by the House, the resolution would prohibit Speaker Pelosi from implementing the ‘Slaughter Solution,’ the scheme by which Democratic leaders are seeking to ‘deem’ the Senate bill as passed without an actual vote in the House," said Michael Steel, a spokesman for the Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio.
That's the "scheme" that Republicans used dozens of times when they had control of the House, of course. Over on the other side of the Hill, Senate Republicans are still whining about reconciliation, and even have enlisted Bobo to the cause. I'll let Ezra do the debunking since he did it so well.
But none of Brooks's evidence is true. Literally none of it. The budget reconciliation process was used six times between 1980 and 1989. It was used four times between 1990 and 1999. It was used five times between 2000 and 2009. And it has been used zero times since 2010. Peak reconciliation use, in other words, was in the '80s, not the Aughts. The data aren't hard to find. They were published on Brooks's own op-ed page.
Nor has reconciliation been limited to bills with "significant bipartisan support." To use Brooks's example of the tax cuts, the 2003 tax cuts passed the Senate 50-50, with Dick Cheney casting the tie-breaking vote. Two Democrats joined with the Republicans in that effort. Georgia's Zell Miller, who would endorse George W. Bush in 2004 and effectively leave the Democratic Party, and Nebraska's Ben Nelson. So I'd say that's one Democrat. One Democrat alongside 49 Republicans. That's not significant bipartisan support....
To recap, Brooks argued that reconciliation is being used more frequently, and that past reconciliation bills, like Bush's tax cuts and prescription drug benefit, were significantly bipartisan. Reconciliation is, in fact, being used less frequently, past reconciliation bills like the tax cuts were not significantly bipartisan by any stretch of the imagination, and the prescription drug benefit did not go through reconciliation. Brooks isn't wrong in the sense that "I disagree with him." He's wrong in the sense that the column requires a correction.
David Brooks? Correction? Yeah, that'll happen. Since the GOP's case against the use of reconciliation is so weak that they have to rely on Bobo to lie about it for them, they need an ace in the hole to derail this, and to that end they only hope to bury it in amendments [sub req.]:
Senior Republican leadership aides were reluctant to divulge the number of amendments Senators are prepared to file. But given that reconciliation rules prevent Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) from limiting amendments to such a bill, the GOP is looking to upend the Democrats’ health care agenda by proposing an unspecified number of changes.
"There is a healthy batch of amendments that were excluded from the health care debate that will serve as a down payment," a senior Republican Senate aide said Monday. "But it is safe to say our Conference has plenty of other ideas that are being put to paper."
Ideas that they hope will make Dems have to take a whole lot of politically difficult votes. Which is precisely why the House doesn't trust the Senate, and has to go to the lengths of things like self-executing rules. If nothing else, this prolonged debate has shown just how deeply broken our system is, that it can be hijacked by a bunch of nihilists who want nothing to do with governing.
Of course, if Obama and every other Democrat with a microphone pointed out that this is what the modern Republican party has become--a bunch of bomb-throwers who think government is the problem--instead of persisting in the delusion that they the loyal opposition who need to be reached out to and who have ideas worthy of consideration, it might be easier to govern around them.
