Blame Reid’s failed leadership for health care deadlock

If Reid moves forward with reconciliation on the health care bill, it will mark the first time the tactic will have been used in a purely partisan manner to break a minority-party filibuster of major legislation since reconciliation emerged in 1974 as a deficit-reduction measure. It will also likely mark the first time it will have been used along a 100 percent party-line vote.

“Usually when a reconciliation measure moves, it’s not as a result of failing to pass a bill in the regular order—welfare reform, Bush tax cuts, Clinton tax measures all used reconciliation from the start,” said Heritage Foundation Senate expert Brian Darling. “This is the first time that reconciliation has been used to pass a bill that hasn’t even passed Congress yet.”

The use of reconciliation in this way also has a flavor of hypocrisy to it, considering Reid’s own condemnation of the Republican effort to end the Democratic filibuster of President Bush’s judicial nominees. The then-Senate minority leader condemned the planned GOP maneuver calling it “an abuse of power.”

Sens. Max Baucus (Mont.) and Kent Conrad (N.D.), two key Democratic senators who have played important roles crafting the Senate health care bill, have been on record in the past similarly condemning reconciliation as an abuse of power.

Baucus, the current Senate Finance Committee chairman, decried the Republican leadership’s use of reconciliation in a May 11, 2006, debate on the so-called Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005.

“With this bill, the majority has once again abused the process. With this bill, the majority has once again shown its disrespect for the rule of law,” Baucus said. “The Senate chose early on to limit the power to use budget reconciliation. The Senate saw early on that this power could be subject to abuse.

“I believe that, today, the majority is taking another step down the road of abusing the reconciliation process … And I thus believe that today the majority is once again cheapening the rule of law.”

Conrad, the current Senate Budget Committee chairman, similarly condemned the GOP’s use of reconciliation in an Apr. 2, 2001, debate on the first round of the Bush tax cuts, saying reconciliation short circuits the Senate’s role as “the cooling saucer, where calmer and cooler reflection could permit further analysis.”

“All of that is out the window, and the Senate becomes a second House of Representatives,” Conrad said.

However, Conrad and Baucus have reversed their prior opposition to reconciliation and have embraced Reid’s plans to use it to pass health care reform.

Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist says the Democrats change of heart on reconciliation is part of their larger about face on ethics and transparency, and is symptomatic of their inability to govern.

“Reconciliation is what you do instead of being bipartisan. With 59 or 60 Democrat Senators it is particularly revealing that the Democrats have retreated to reconciliation,” Norquist said.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines incompetence as the “inability to manage one’s affairs,” and clearly Harry Reid’s inability or unwillingness to follow Lyndon Johnson’s example fits the bill.

John Rossomando is a journalist whose work has been featured in numerous publications such as CNSNews.com, Newsmax and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award in 2008 for his reporting.