One more time: Why reconciliation should be finished first

If the House passes the Senate health insurance reform bill before the Congress completes work on the reconciliation fix (and yes, that's entirely permissible), what then is the incentive for the Senate to hold up its end of the bargain as agreed, and not to try to slip something extra by on the House?

Here's the scenario I worry about:

1. The House passes Senate bill. That leaves Democrats at least temporarily in the position of having ratified a bunch of stuff they say they don't like and which even the sponsors of those measures aren't willing to live with anymore. We're talking about the "Cadillac tax," the state-specific deals that came to be known as the "Cornhusker Kickback," the "Louisiana Purchase," etc.

2. The House passes the reconciliation fix and sends it to the Senate, as agreed.

3. This is the point where the Senate realizes they have the House over a barrel and can add something that perhaps they want, but know the House doesn't. The Senate amends the reconciliation bill and sends it back to the House.

4. At this point, under normal circumstances, the House and Senate could move to go to a conference to settle the differences. But the parliamentary motions necessary to go to conference in the Senate are -- you guessed it! --  subject to the filibuster. So the differences would likely have to be settled some other way.

5. The House now has a choice: 1) eat it and accept the Senate's amendment; 2) kill the reconciliation bill and leave House Dems stuck with the ratification of the Nebraska deal, etc., or; 3) try to amend the amended reconciliation bill and send it back to the Senate yet again.

But the Senate knows that the House knows that reconciliation won't likely survive the Senate twice. It's quite possible that Senate Republicans could make passing it even once moreof a challengethan Democrats are likely to be comfortable with. That creates an opportunity for the Senate to try to slip something by the House, and force the House to either take the bullet on the Nebraska deal, etc. if they decline to swallow it, or watch them knuckle under yet again and give the Senate what it wants.

What will the Senate want? I don't know yet. But I hear ideas bouncing around that people aren't going to like very much, including even more restrictive language on abortion, if you can believe that (though in that scenario, the question of which house wants it more is a lot cloudier).

But why would Senators allow the Nebraska deal to stand? Well, do they care that much? They'll be on record as being the last house to touch the fix, and as far as the Nebraska deal is concerned, they voted to kill it. It's not their fault (they'll say) if they send that fix to the House intact, only to have the House decline to pass it. Their hands are clean!

After watching how Republicans used the negative buzz on the "Cornhusker Kickback" in the special election for the Massachusetts Senate seat, and knowing that the failure to fix the so-called "Cadillac tax" would essentially be spitting in the face of the unions who provide so much in the way of GOTV ground troops, just as we're heading into one of those traditionally low-turnout mid-term elections, well, there are a lot of reasons to want to be sure nothing goes wrong with this reconciliation bill. Including its use by the Senate as a must-pass vehicle to slip something unwanted past the House.

That's the problem. The only way for the House to know what it's getting in the HCR/reconciliation bargain is for the House to wait for reconciliation to be done before passing the Senate HCR bill.

At the very least, having gotten this far with things, the Senate should restrain itself if they're thinking of gaming the situation, and doing anything other than passing unchanged the reconciliation bill handed to them by the House. And that'd perhaps be something you could count on if reconciliation weren't such an unpredictable procedure.

But it is.

Article from Congress Matters read more here