Marc Ambinder and Jon Cohn both hear that the reconciliation process will survive the conference that merges the House and Senate budget proposals. I'm not hearing anything different, though nor am I certain that final decisions have been reached. Kent Conrad, for one, has been suggesting that it's better to leave reconciliation out of the conference bill, secure in the knowledge that it could be included in a second budget resolution which could be passed with 10 hours of debate and 50 votes. The virtue of that strategy is that Republicans really couldn't argue that Democrats were pursuing reconciliation before the normal order had failed. The downside is that you'd lose a lot of time waiting to see if the normal order failed. The virtue of keeping reconciliation omnipresent in the debate -- which is what would happen if it remained in the budget after conference -- is that it ratchets up the pressure on Senate Republicans to preserve a bipartisan process. It's slightly paradoxical, but being unable to ensure the bill's failure might make them more likely to participate in its success. In the Senate, someone who wants to stop a bill from passing may not want their priorities left out of the bill if it's going to pass anyway. The key point is that Democrats are taking the potential necessity of reconciliation very seriously. Everyone would prefer, of course, that health care is a bipartisan bill with 70 votes in the affirmative. The inherent chaos of the reconciliation process, and the fact that each piece of the bill could be challenged on a provision-by-provision basis, means that no one is sure of what health reform would look like if Democrats use reconciliation. But everyone is sure of what it looks like if Democrats fail to pass a bill. Democrats are much more afraid of total failure than they are of reconciliation.
