SALON
Friday, Jan 16, 2015 01:50 PM EST
Budget reconciliation offers the new GOP
Congress its best chance at achieving something. Will they waste it?
Jim Newell
Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kansas (Credit: AP/John Hanna)
The
overarching goal for Republican leaders at their ongoing joint
House-Senate retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania seems to be,
euphemistically put, “educating members” about what they can and cannot
achieve in the 114th Congress. Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and their
leadership teams will try to “educate” the hot-bellied rank-and-file in
the direction of achieving practical, if not
thrilling, results that “shows they can govern responsibly.”
A
lot of this “education” involves second-grade level arithmetic that
national legislators should be able to work out on their own but
apparently cannot. The simple mathematic principle is this: without
two-thirds majorities in both the House and Senate, the Republicans
cannot enact whatever bills they want into law. That’s supposing that a
bill even makes it as far as the president’s desk: without Democratic
input in the Senate, Republicans will have a lot of trouble clearing
past procedural hurdles there.
“Educating.”
Republicans
will, however, have one (1) opportunity to work around a Senate
filibuster over the next two years: budget reconciliation. It’s a
convoluted process, but in short, budget reconciliation allows a Senate
majority to bypass the filibuster on a piece of legislation that meets
certain budgetary requirements — that it doesn’t increase the deficit,
for example, at least if the legislative changes are to be permanent.
The are two strategic ways to go about using a reconciliation bill
wisely.
If
your party has control of both Congress and the presidency,
reconciliation simply lets you bypass the Senate minority’s filibuster
and get your most desired bundle of goodies straight to the president.
President George W. Bush and the Republicans passed their 2001 and 2003
tax cuts through reconciliation. (Since they increased the deficit, they
sunsetted after 10 years.) And the Democratic Senate passed a package
of Affordable Care Act tidying-up in 2010 through reconciliation.
Using
reconciliation in the sort of divided government that we have now is
trickier. There’s no point in Republicans using this one-off opportunity
to pass something insane that President Obama would never consider
signing. To use reconciliation as a “messaging” bill would be wasteful.
It would be smarter to use reconciliation on an issue that the president
himself is interested in: say, corporate tax reform. Since Senate
Republicans would be able to move their proposal with 51 votes, they
wouldn’t need to tailor it to the desires of Senate Democrats. Then they
could say to President Obama, “well, you said you wanted corporate tax
reform; here’s your corporate tax reform.” Obama would have to make a
difficult decision.
Educating. Members. That’s how new House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Tom Price spent the day in Hershey on Thursday,
National Journal reports.
He educated members on the fact that reconciliation is a “powerful
tool, but not a silver bullet.” Reconciliation will not allow them to
turn the country into their dreary free-market dystopia with one magical
flick of the wand.
The subtext of Price’s remarks: using
reconciliation to pass a repeal of the Affordable Care Act would be so,
so stupid. President Obama would veto it and laugh his ass off, and that
would be the end of it. There was
some chatter around the the election among conservative media/pressure group circles
about using reconciliation to pass a repeal of the ACA, but it seemed
like the energy for that dissipated as its futility sunk in.
But the futility has not really sunk in. Or it
has sunk in, and conservative members want to do it anyway for pure YOLO purposes. Here is Rep. Tim Huelskamp, Boehner antagonist,
Cool Conservatives Club founding member, and incoming head of the Bachmann-founded House Tea Party Caucus:
This
question is troublesome to members like Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, a
conservative who says he speaks for a powerful populist Republican base
(he told Bloomberg News that he will be the next chairman of the House
Tea Party Caucus). Huelskamp says the only way Republicans can show they
are serious about their hatred for the health care law is to use every
tool at their disposal to roll it back. After all, it was public anger
over health care that handed Republicans control of Congress, he
reasoned.
“[Reconciliation] is the only chance to take it down.
There’s no other strategy. I’d love to hear one. I’d love to be wrong,”
Huelskamp said Wednesday. “We can’t do it next year. It’s too late
because they’ll say it’s an election year.” [...]
Huelskamp is
also part of the new caucus of far-right House members who are forming
an invite-only group that is intended, at least in part, to take on more
traditional Republican stances like spending on infrastructure or
bargaining with the White House. Expect this group to howl if Republican
leaders decide to simply hold more repeal-Obamacare votes that go
nowhere.
Jesus. How do you get through to a guy like this? Is it possible?
Reconciliation is
not “the
only chance to take it down.” There is no chance to take down the
Affordable Care Act. President Obama! Veto pen! Wake up, guy! Huelskamp
and those who agree with him are tired of “repeal-Obamacare votes that
go nowhere.” Well, who isn’t? It’s just bizarre that they consider
sending a bill to President Obama
repealing his signature health care law,
that he would instantly veto, something other than a vote that goes
nowhere. That’s precisely what it is. It just gets one step further on
the path to nowhere. The destination is the same.
Huelskamp added
that “an all-out war on Obamacare ‘is the only way to preserve our
conservative credentials.’” That’s telling. The only way to prove that
you’re a Real Conservative is to pass a beefed-up protest vote that
comes with serious opportunity costs.
The Tim Huelskamps of the
world and the leaders of the GOP speak to very different constituencies.
Tim Huelskamp is trying to prove to a narrow band of old white
conservative people in Kansas that he is the most conservative person
ever. The leaders of the GOP are trying to prove to the country at large
that their party is marginally adult-like ahead of the next
presidential election. There’s no “educating” away this gap in
interests.
Jim Newell covers politics and media for Salon.
