When it comes time to sort out the heroes and villains of the struggle to pass health care reform, Kent Conrad is definitely going to be in the villain column.
“The only way this works is for the House to pass the Senate bill and then, depending on what the package is, the reconciliation provision that moves first through the House and then comes here,” said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND). “That’s the only way that works.”
I pointed out that House leadership has repeatedly said they won’t take a flier on a reconciliation package–that they will only pass the Senate bill after the smaller side-car reconciliation bill has been all wrapped up.
“Fine, then it’s dead,” Conrad said.
Conrad added that he wouldn’t personally make any promises or symbolic gestures to House members to assure them that the Senate can or will take any action in a reconciliation bill to address House concerns.
“I don’t sign any blank check,” Conrad said.
As chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Conrad has a large say in how the budget reconciliation process is used, and he has never been a supporter of using it to pass health care. A month ago he relented somewhat in the limited sense that he said he might support a sidecar reconciliation bill if the House passed the Senate bill first. But he reiterated his overall opposition to the use of reconciliation:
“I have never supported the use of reconciliation for healthcare reform writ large,” he said Wednesday. “I’ve never thought that would work. I think the reason it wasn’t used is it became clear to others that it wouldn’t work for a whole series of reasons.”
Last April Think Progress’s Ryan Powers tried to explain things to Conrad, to no avail.
If Conrad is committed to health care reform, he would do well to support the use of the reconciliation process, should it be necessary. Indeed, as he himself argued last fall, “[I]f we as a society fail to control health care costs, there will be a detrimental effect on our nation’s economy and standard of living.”
Keeping reconciliation on the table does not preclude using the “regular Senate process” that Conrad prefers. To make use of that regular process requires that congressional Republicans negotiate health care reform in good faith. But as Igor Volsky explains, Republicans have shown in recent months that they have no intention of doing so:
By constantly bitching about even issuing the threat of using reconciliation, Conrad cut the knees out of a vital negotiating stratagem. He effectively assured that the administration would be constrained by a 60-vote requirement and that people would get it in their heads that health care reform would live or die based on the ability to obtain a supermajority in support of it.
Nothing undermined efforts at bipartisanship more than setting up these near impossible expectations.
