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I've been thinking about this great @sarahkliff @sangerkatz piece on what Senate Democrats can and can't do on health care, which dives into what budget reconciliation allows.
I want to talk about how Democrats say "can't" when they mean "won't." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/upshot/biden-democrats-heath-plans.html
I want to talk about how Democrats say "can't" when they mean "won't." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/upshot/biden-democrats-heath-plans.html
It's true that budget reconciliation has all kinds of weird rules that make ambitious policy hard. And for the record, I loathe the budget reconciliation process. It's enormously stupid and destructive.
Rather than getting rid of the filibuster, senators abuse an unrelated legislative process that protects bills from the filibuster at the cost of worsening them substantively, and warping the priorities of the entire institution. See argument 6 here. https://www.vox.com/21424582/filibuster-joe-biden-2020-senate-democrats-abolish-trump
That said, budget reconciliation's constraints rely on abiding by the rulings of the senate parliamentarian. The VP plus 50 senators could simply vote to...not do that. This was, more or less, how Bernie Sanders said he'd try to get around the filibuster. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/4/11/18306132/bernie-sanders-filibuster-budget-reconciliation-medicare-60-votes
Now maybe Senate Democrats don't want to do that, just as crucial members of the caucus don't want to get rid of the filibuster, for reasons I disagree with.
But it's not that they can't do that. It's that they don't want to. They have the agency. They are making a choice.
But it's not that they can't do that. It's that they don't want to. They have the agency. They are making a choice.
The choice, in this case, would be to prioritize not just Senate rules, but bizarre perversions of Senate rules, above the promises they've made to the voters who elected them. Fealty to the Byrd rule becomes more important than expanding health insurance.
I think this is a bad choice to make, but either way, it should be seen for what it is: a choice, not an inevitability.
One last point: Oftentimes these rules survive because they give caucuses an excuse for not doing things that divide them. As the article notes, the deeper issue here may be that Democrats don't want to do what they've promised, and the rule is a convenient excuse.
