Tag: explainer

Say Hello to the Woodman

Robert Lauder: At one point in Hannah and Her Sisters, your character, Mickey, is very disillusioned. He is thinking about becoming a Catholic and he sees Duck Soup. He seems to think, “Maybe in a world where there are the Marx Brothers and humor, maybe there is a God. Who knows.” And maybe Mickey can live with that. Am I interpreting this correctly?

Woody Allen: No. I think it should be interpreted to mean that there are these oases, and life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do…. I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of Deconstructing Harry: we all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that’s it. Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful.

In an op-ed in Tuesday’s Post, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) offered an excellent example of this hypocrisy. Right off, the piece was wrong on a core fact. Hatch accused the Democrats of trying to, yes, “ram through the Senate a multitrillion-dollar health-care bill.”

No. The health-care bill passed the Senate in December with 60 votes under the normal process. The only thing that would pass under a simple majority vote would be a series of amendments that fit comfortably under the “reconciliation” rules established to deal with money issues. Near the end of his column, Hatch conceded that reconciliation would be used for “only parts” of the bill. But why didn’t he say that in the first place?

Hatch grandly cited “America’s Founders” as wanting the Senate to be about “deliberation.” But the Founders said nothing in the Constitution about the filibuster, let alone “reconciliation.” Judging from what they put in the actual document, the Founders would be appalled at the idea that every major bill should need the votes of three-fifths of the Senate to pass.

[…]

Hatch said that reconciliation should not be used for “substantive legislation” unless the legislation has “significant bipartisan support.” But surely the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, which were passed under reconciliation and increased the deficit by $1.7 trillion during his presidency, were “substantive legislation.” The 2003 dividends tax cut could muster only 50 votes. Vice President Dick Cheney had to break the tie. Talk about “ramming through.”

E.J. Dionne. Thank you.

MicroReconciliation

Memo to the media: healthcare reform has already passed. Both houses of Congress. It is done.

However, the two houses passed marginally different versions of the legislation. Thus, the House will likely pass a modified version of the Senate bill. The Senate, then, will reconcile their already passed bill with that “final” output. The order of the action may flip, but that’s really just window dressing. The point is that reconciliation will only be in use for the points of disagreement between House and Senate, which are few.

There is not and will not be any attempt to “pass the healthcare reforms package” via reconciliation. What there may be is an attempt to reconcile House and Senate versions of the bill through the rather aptly named reconciliation process instead of through a joint House/Senate conference committee and normal order.

Once more: if and when healthcare reform reaches Obama’s desk for signature, it will have passed through normal order. Period. Minor differences will have been ironed out through a kind of “sidecar” bill using reconciliation; it will functionally amend previously passed legislation. But the bulk of the reform: already passed through normal order.

Perhaps a six-hour televised summit on this is necessary to pound it through Our Media Overlords’ heads. I know they find it bore-ing, but that’s life in the big city.