Reconciliation: Fill & Download for Free

Really? The very nature of prayer involves reconciliation and forgiving?“Please God, strike down my enemies!”“I pray that my team wins!”“I pray that I get that job/girlfriend/apartment!”“I pray that the baby doesn’t start crying just when I’m about to sleep!”“I pray that Napster doesn’t poop outside the litter box!”As an atheist, I find that if I want to reconcile and forgive, I should not pray about it, but should get on with doing it.

Absolutely. It’s called Budget Reconciliation, although it’s subject to some restrictions.Bills passed under the reconciliation process cannot be filibustered. But in order to use the process, Congress must first pass a budget resolution that includes reconciliation instructions, and can only pass one bill per budgetary year in this fashion. In addition, bills passed through this process cannot increase the deficit over a 10-year period.So why didn’t Republicans do this in the last 2 years?Well, remember how I said you can use the process once for each budgetary year? Yeah, well, they had other things they thought were more important that they wanted to use this process for.In February of 2017, Republicans passed a new budget resolution for the 2017 fiscal year (despite the fact that it was almost half over; federal fiscal years start October 1 of the preceding calendar year.) This resolution included reconciliation instructions allowing Congress to draft a reconciliation bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They did this because they knew Democrats would filibuster any repeal of the ACA (commonly called “Obamacare”.) So they used the reconciliation process in 2017 for repeal of the ACA, which ended up failing to pass the Senate when it did not get majority support from Republicans (thanks to Susan Collins and John McCain.) Once the ACA repeal failed, they could have passed a new set of reconciliation instructions for 2017 before that fiscal year ended on September 30 (since the previous reconciliation bill failed to pass), or they could have passed instructions for 2018 to fund a border wall. But it was not a priority for the Republican Congress, so they did not. For 2018, they had another plan in mind; they wanted to pass their tax cut bill via reconciliation. (Remember they can pass one bill via reconciliation every year.) They could have attached a wall funding measure to that bill, but it would have made the math harder to work out (remember it can’t increase the deficit over more than 10 years, which is why most of the tax cuts they passed expire within 10 years.) It’s important to note that the $5.6 billion Trump is asking for now will not build the whole wall, or even a significant part of it; the money he wants now is to build about 200 miles of wall in certain areas; this is about 1/10 of the wall Trump promised to build on the campaign trail, and is largely meant to be a symbolic victory for Trump. So actually funding the wall in a meaningful way would have cost a lot more, and would have made it harder to meet the Reconciliation requirements (though not impossible; they’d have just had to specify some other spending cut or tax increase of equal value over a 10-year period.) Again, it just wasn’t much of a priority for them; the wall was a Trump priority, not a Republican party establishment priority.So was there a way for Republicans to pass funding for a wall without a Democratic filibuster during the two years they controlled both Houses of Congress? Yes, but they had other things they wanted to use the reconciliation process for, that they thought were more important.

For most things, Republicans need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, just as Democrats did.However, there are certain circumstances in which legislation is exempt from the filibuster, and therefore can be passed with a simple majority. Republicans have been exploiting this rule to avoid making compromises as they try to pass their agenda on strict party lines.Basically, they are exploiting a process called budget reconciliation. Measures passed under budget reconciliation cannot be filibustered. Both parties have done this in the past but what has been unusual is that during the current session of Congress Republicans have openly planned to use the reconciliation process to pass two major agenda items: repeal of the Affordable Care Act and Tax Reform.Budget reconciliation operates under fairly strict rules, which is why it often cannot be applied. In order to use this process, the Senate must first pass a budget that includes “reconciliation instructions,” a provision allowing for a bill to be passed via the reconciliation process. The bill in question must affect revenue or spending levels, and crucially, cannot increase the deficit for a period of more than 10 years. (This last one makes it very hard to pass most spending legislation under reconciliation.)Also, they can only pass one reconciliation bill for each fiscal year.So what’s been happening is this: early in 2017, Republicans passed a new budget that still applied to the 2017 fiscal year (which ended on September 30.) That budget included reconciliation instructions allowing for the repeal of significant parts of the Affordable Care Act. However, they could only repeal those parts that affect spending levels — many of the regulations established under the ACA do not, and therefore were not included in any of the ACA repeal proposals, which angered a lot of conservatives, especially in the House, who wanted to rip out the entire ACA. Ultimately, they had until the end of the 2017 fiscal year on September 30 to pass an ACA repeal bill under the instructions they passed in the 2017 budget. But because this was under reconciliation, they only needed a simple majority to pass it.Still, they failed to get enough Republican votes to pass ACA repeal under reconciliation before the 2017 reconciliation instructions expired. So for the 2018 fiscal year (which began on October 1, 2017) they had to pass a new budget with new reconciliation instructions if they wanted to use the process again. However, since they can only pass one reconciliation bill per year, they had to choose between going at ACA repeal again or working on a Tax Reform bill instead. They chose Tax Reform, and are now trying to draft legislation that can meet reconciliation requirements and pass with a simple majority.The big sticking point is the rule that bills passed under reconciliation cannot add to the deficit for more than 10 years. In 2002, Republicans passed the Bush Tax Cuts through reconciliation to avoid a Democratic filibuster, but because those cuts added to the deficit, they were written to expire after 10 years. Republicans have to choose this time around whether they want deeper cuts that expire in 10 years or whether they want to balance tax cuts with new revenue raised from eliminating deductions and other tax loopholes. The reason why you’re hearing that many people will see a net tax increase under the current proposals is that, to avoid raising the deficit 10 years from now, most of the proposals the House and Senate are considering now both eliminate some popular tax deductions and use various budgetary tricks (like changing the way tax brackets are adjusted over time for inflation) that actually will lead to many people seeing an early tax cut in the first few years followed by several years of gradual tax increases. This seems to be especially true of lower-income families.Senate Republicans’ tax plan raises taxes on families earning less than $75,000So the tax reform bill, if it passes, is the one and only thing Republicans can pass between now and September 30, 2018 without being subject to a filibuster under reconciliation rules (unless they fail to pass anything, and give up and write a new budget with new reconciliation instructions for something else.)You may be asking, “Why didn’t Democrats use reconciliation to avoid filibusters when Obama was president?” The answer is they did… while they controlled both Houses of Congress. When the ACA was passed, due to some differences in the versions of the bill passed in the House and the Senate and the fact that Republican Scott Brown won a special election giving Republicans 41 Senate seats in 2010 as the bill was being finished, portions of the ACA had to be passed via reconciliation to avoid a filibuster. But going through the reconciliation process really requires the cooperation of both Houses, which have to pass the same budget with the same instructions and have to vote for a bill that meets the strict requirements. After 2010, Republicans controlled the House, which meant reconciliation was no longer an effective option in the Senate, which Democrats controlled until the 2014 elections.