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Take a little time and truly look at the practice. It is reprehensible for either party to even consider the practice, let alone changing laws to benefit themselves and not the people (replacement of Ted Kennedy for example).
Either abide by the way the rules were originally set up or be gracious and admit that your side lost.
Republicans had no problems using reconciliation to push through their America hating agenda so Dems should feel no compunction about using it to push through things America needs like health care reform. To bad the Dems are their own worst enemies and the corporatist Dems will keep trying to kill any real reform just as they have been doing for the last year.
So everyone, just stop already with all this yapping about how this "nuclear option" is SOOO unprecedented, never been used for health care, blah blah.
I'm glad to see "nuclear option" in quotes. As I'm sure most of us know, the "nuclear option" was a Republican idea that has never been used, nor is it being proposed now.
Of possible interest:
Reconciliation can be used to find savings - a letter to the editor by Senator Robert Byrd (someone who knows a thing or two about the process of budget reconciliation):
I believed then, as now, that the Senate should debate the health reform bill under regular rules, which it did. The result of that debate was the passing of a comprehensive health care reform bill in the Senate by a 60-vote supermajority.
I continue to support the budget reconciliation process for deficit reduction. The entire Senate- or House- passed health care bill could not and would not pass muster under the current reconciliation rules, which were established under my watch.
Yet a bill structured to reduce deficits by, for example, finding savings in Medicare or lowering health care costs, may be consistent with the Budget Act, and appropriately considered under reconciliation.
Reconciliation is not being considered for passing comprehensive health-care reform. Major health-care reform legislation passed the Senate without reconciliation on Christmas Eve. If the House now passes that legislation, it can go immediately to President Obama's desk to be signed into law. What the president and others have suggested is that, after the House acts, reconciliation could then be used to pass a much smaller "fixer" bill to allow for modifications to the comprehensive bill that will have passed under regular order.
While some have described reconciliation -- a process that requires only a majority vote in the Senate to pass legislation that reduces the deficit -- as an obscure, rarely used procedure, the truth is that it has been used 22 times since 1980, with 16 of those times occurring when Republicans controlled the Senate. Republican efforts to block its use now for a "fixer" bill represent little more than a politically expedient attempt to kill health-care legislation.
Some question how the then-Republican majority used reconciliation to pass a $1.3 trillion tax cut in 2001 and another $350 billion tax cut in 2003, all entirely unpaid for. These were clear abuses of the process. The authors of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, which established reconciliation, never envisioned it would be used to worsen the deficit. After Democrats took control of the Senate in 2007, we restored fiscal discipline and added an explicit rule requiring reconciliation be used only for deficit reduction. So it is particularly ironic to hear many Republicans criticize Democrats' use of reconciliation today, when it is being used properly, while they vehemently defended their use of the process when it was being abused.
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