Maxine Waters, bipartisan compromiser extraordinaire

By Jennifer J. Foster

You gotta love Maxine Waters. True to her district, she’s all about the entertainment factor.

The kooky, longtime Los Angeles congresswoman was at it again this weekend while hosting a town hall meeting on health care reform.

Waters was making her case that further attempts at bipartisanship are futile because, and this is a quote: Some U.S. senators “are Neanderthals.“

Here it is in context, just so the good congresswoman can’t whine about her remarks being misinterpreted:

“Not only are we going to do everything we can to organize and put pressure on the senators — some of whom are Neanderthals — we’re going to say to the president, ‘We want you to use every weapon in your basket in order to get those senators to do what they should be doing,‘ “ she said.

Yes. I know that my ideas feel welcome at the table when I am being called a caveman. Hooray for true attempts at bipartisanship!!

And did you catch the last part of her statement—“Get those senators to do what they should be doing”—? Gee, Congresswoman Waters, I bet if you talked to their constituents, most of them would say they that by exercising caution on this issue and opposing a government health care plan, they are doing what they should be doing.

I hate to break it to you, Maxine, but you only represent the good folks of the California 35th. You say you seek to represent the values of your constituents; more power to you. But how dare you seek to substitute those values for anyone else’s?

Actually, there’s irony in Waters’ statement. Disrespecting and actually seeking to tamp down the perspectives and values of fellow Americans?

Talk about your backwards way of thinking.

Reid’s in trouble

By Jennifer J. Foster

Power, apparently, isn’t everything.

Harry Reid may be the majority leader of the United States Senate, but it looks like he is going to have his hands full in his bid for re-election next year.

According to a poll by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Reid trails his current GOP challenger, Danny Tarkanian, by 11 points, 49 percent to 38.

The poll’s margin of error is five points.

Get this: Reid, who controls the Senate and everything that goes on in it, is behind a guy whose major claim to fame is a basketball pedigree.

Even a potential candidate is beating Reid in a theoretical matchup: Sue Lowden, chairwoman of the Nevada Republican Party and a possible candidate, leads Reid by five.

That doesn’t say a whole lot about Nevadans’ confidence in Reid.

Now, consider that the Silver State was solidly in the Democratic column on Election Day last year (Barack Obama beat John McCain by 13 points).

Hey, Harry: What does that tell you?

I wanna hold your hand

By Jennifer J. Foster

I told you last week about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s romantic getaway trip to Bermuda.

An intrepid paparazzo gives us this look at the happy couple strolling across the resort property, hand in hand.

Looks like things are going well.

More on reconciliation

By Jennifer J. Foster

So The New York Times didn’t do much for us in terms of defining this budget reconciliation process that might be used to completely overhaul the American health care system.

Luckily, we have this 1998 piece from the Parliamentary Outreach Program of the United States House of Representatives’ Committee on Rules.

According to the good folks at POP (every good government program has to have an acronym):

The reconciliation process is utilized when Congress issues directives to legislate policy changes in mandatory spending (entitlements) or revenue programs (tax laws) to achieve the goals in spending and revenue contemplated by the budget resolution.

The subsequent elaborations and illustrations of what reconciliation is and how it works are enough to make any government policy wonk dizzy with glee. If you’re not one for parliamentary procedure, then these are the takeaways from reconciliation for you:

It was first used in 1980 at the end of a fiscal year to enact legislation to fine tune revenue and spending levels through legislation that could not be filibustered in the Senate.

The process begins with the inclusion of reconciliation instructions in the budget resolution. These instructions require authorizing committees with jurisdiction over mandatory spending and revenue policies (usually more than one) to make legislative changes in those programs to effect a specified level of budgetary savings provisions.

Once the relevant authorizing committees have reported their legislation to the Budget Committees, it is the Budget Committees’ responsibility to combine those bills into an omnibus package (or packages) as specified by the budget resolution. The legislative products of the authorizing committees are packaged together with report language and the Congressional Budget Office’s and the Joint Committee on Taxation’s cost estimates.

There are specific expedited procedures and restrictions for floor consideration of reconciliation measures under the reconciliation process. More on that in a minute.

Once a reconciliation bill is passed in the House and Senate, the reconciliation product is subject to the conference process, as general bills are. Approval of the conference agreement on the reconciliation legislation must be by a majority vote of both Houses. In contrast to the concurrent budget resolution, a reconciliation bill is sent to the President for approval or disapproval.

OK. Now, back to that point on floor consideration: Under Senate rules, debate on reconciliation is limited to 20 HOURS. The POP piece notes that “the actual time for consideration of the omnibus package often exceeds this time limit set in the Budget Act. Motions and amendments may be offered and considered without debate at the end of this time period.“ But if health care reform is pursued through reconciliation, under what “omnibus package” will extended debate fall?

It is just disturbing to me whenever lawmakers change their rules in the middle of the game. If you don’t have the votes for something, then that should be a sign to you that perhaps you should go back and work on your bill some more. It isn’t a green light to go and dig up arcane legislative maneuvers so that you can pass something you can’t otherwise get through on its merits.

Although reconciliation was used 13 times between 1980 and 1998, it was used for budget purposes—tax reduction, tax increases, deficit reduction, mandatory spending increases or decreases or adjustments in the public debt limit, according to the POP piece.

It has never been used as a tool to force major social policy change.

And that should be a clue to liberal Democrats who are considering this move that they are way off the mark—and they are way out of line.

What is ‘reconciliation?‘

By Jennifer J. Foster

You might have earned As through all your American government and civics classes through school. But I bet you don’t know what “reconciliation” is, at least when it comes to legislative tactics.

Don’t worry. I’m here for you.

I mentioned in the previous post that Democrats are talking about using the tactic to get the working version of health care reform, the much-maligned H.R. 3200, through Congress. Of course, since even Democrats are expressing concern with the bill, this will mean protecting the bill from a filibuster in the Senate.

Here we have a handy definition of “reconciliation” from The New York Times:

In the last week, Democrats have begun to talk openly of using a procedure known as budget reconciliation to pass a health bill in the Senate with a simple majority, assuming no Republican support. To do that, under Senate rules, they would probably need to show that the public plan changed federal spending or revenues and that the effects were not “merely incidental” to the changes in health policy.

Democrats believe they could clear this hurdle by demonstrating that the public plan would save money or cost money.

“If a public plan is shown to have a cost to the government that affects outlays or revenues, it could be included in a health care bill using reconciliation procedures,” said Martin P. Paone, a former Senate aide who has been consulted by Senate Democrats.

OK, so it’s not so much a formal definition as it is an explanation. But at least now we know what they are talking about.

And who’s in the middle of this movement to cut half the Congress out of the process?

Why, it’s none other than New York’s favorite liberal, Chuck Schumer.

Republicans, of course, object:

Republicans object to both the idea of a new government plan and the use of expedited procedures to push it through the Senate on a simple majority vote.

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said that using the budget reconciliation procedure to pass a health bill would be “an abuse of the process,” which was meant to focus on spending and tax policy. Moreover, Mr. Hatch said, “every Republican says that they will not be for a public option.”

Mr. Hatch said a new public insurance program could “bankrupt the country.” He said it made no sense to “throw out a system that works for 85 percent” of the population so Congress could take care of the 15 percent who were uninsured.

Aww, those troublemaking Republicans. Always saying no. Bankrupt-schmankrupt. Never mind the 85 percent ... you know moral imperatives only apply to the minority.

But wait! Here’s a Democrat (OK, former-Democrat-who-still-caucuses-with-Democrats) who also wants to rain on the liberals’ cover-everyone-at-any-cost parade!

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, said Mr. Obama should take a more gradual approach. “We morally, every one of us, would like to cover every American with health insurance,” Mr. Lieberman said on “State of the Union” on CNN. But, he noted, “that’s where you spend most of the $1 trillion” in expected costs over 10 years.

“We’ve got to think about putting a lot of that off until the economy’s out of recession,” he added. “There’s no reason we have to do it all now, but we do have to get started. And I think the place to start is cost, health delivery reform and insurance market reforms.”

What’s that? Positive incremental change, instead of a wholesale, unpredictable, cost-unsustainable, overreaching overhaul of the entire system?

Joe, I don’t think anyone is going to be saving you a seat at the next Senate Democratic Caucus.

You just make too much sense.