Deep in this article on the Obama administration's unwillingness to rule out reconciliation comes the common recitation of constraints reconciliation would impose on any bill. Policies passed under the expedited process expire after 10 years and have to be deeply linked to the budget and tend to eliminate administrative language. A health care bill going through reconciliation would look a lot stranger than a health care bill passed through the normal process. Which isn't to say that non-budget bills never travel through reconciliation. George W. Bush used reconciliation for tax cuts, ANWR drilling, Medicaid cuts, Medicare tax changes, trade authority, and much else. Judd Gregg -- now the Senate's leading reconciliation skeptic -- voted for every single one of these initiatives. Under Clinton, reconciliation was used to reform welfare, balance the budget, and, by the Republicans, to enact the Contract With America (Clinton vetoed). The restrictions on what reconciliation can consider are not really intrinsic to the process. Rather, they're a function of the so-called "Byrd rule," which limits reconciliation to legislation that changes spending, forces neutrality outside the 10-year window (that's why Bush's tax cut are set to expire this year), and imposes all manner of restrictions on it. If not for the Byrd rule, you could basically do anything under reconciliation. In practice, it would merely take a majority of senators on the Budget Committee to dismantle it. If that was done, reconciliation would make the Senate an effective 50-vote institution, just as the filibuster made it an effective 60-vote institution. Is that likely? Probably not. But these rules were made by man, not God. Hell, they weren't even made by the founders. Robert Byrd is still a senator! If the Democrats decide passing health reform or averting climate change is more important than respecting rules passed by their elderly colleagues, then they can change the rules. HOW DO YOU ASK A MAN TO BE THE LAST TO DIE FOR THE BYRD RULE?
Deep in this article on the Obama administration's unwillingness to rule out reconciliation comes the common recitation of constraints reconciliation would impose on any bill. Policies passed under the expedited process expire after 10 years and have to be deeply linked to the budget and tend to eliminate administrative language. A health care bill going through reconciliation would look a lot stranger than a health care bill passed through the normal process. Which isn't to say that non-budget bills never travel through reconciliation. George W. Bush used reconciliation for tax cuts, ANWR drilling, Medicaid cuts, Medicare tax changes, trade authority, and much else. Judd Gregg -- now the Senate's leading reconciliation skeptic -- voted for every single one of these initiatives. Under Clinton, reconciliation was used to reform welfare, balance the budget, and, by the Republicans, to enact the Contract With America (Clinton vetoed). The restrictions on what reconciliation can consider are not really intrinsic to the process. Rather, they're a function of the so-called "Byrd rule," which limits reconciliation to legislation that changes spending, forces neutrality outside the 10-year window (that's why Bush's tax cut are set to expire this year), and imposes all manner of restrictions on it. If not for the Byrd rule, you could basically do anything under reconciliation. In practice, it would merely take a majority of senators on the Budget Committee to dismantle it. If that was done, reconciliation would make the Senate an effective 50-vote institution, just as the filibuster made it an effective 60-vote institution. Is that likely? Probably not. But these rules were made by man, not God. Hell, they weren't even made by the founders. Robert Byrd is still a senator! If the Democrats decide passing health reform or averting climate change is more important than respecting rules passed by their elderly colleagues, then they can change the rules. 
