Once Bill Is Reconciled Is It Voted on Again in House and Senate
With the Senate evenly divided betwixt Democrats and Republicans, 50 each, giving Vice President Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote, in that location is a lot of attention to a legislative process for getting revenue enhancement and spending bills through the Senate known as reconciliation. Here's what it is and how it works.
When and why does Congress use reconciliation?
Reconciliation is, substantially, a way for Congress to enact legislation on taxes, spending, and the debt limit with only a majority (51 votes, or 50 if the vice president breaks a tie) in the Senate, fugitive the threat of a delay, which requires lx votes to overcome. Considering Democrats accept l seats in the Senate—plus a Autonomous vice president—reconciliation is a way to get a tax-and-spending bill to the president's desk even if all l Republicans oppose it.
Since its first use in 1980, reconciliation has been used to enact 22 bills as of April 2021 (four others were passed but vetoed by the president), including such meaning pieces of legislation equally major deficit reduction bills in the 1980s and 1990s, welfare reform in 1996, the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, the Trump taxation cuts in 2017, and the American Rescue Plan under Joe Biden. It too played a big role in shaping the Affordable Care Human activity in 2010. Republicans tried and failed to use reconciliation to repeal big parts of the Affordable Care Act in 2016 and 2017. President Obama vetoed the 2016 attempt; the "no" votes of three Republican senators blocked the 2017 attempt.
How does the reconciliation process piece of work?
Congress is supposed to laissez passer a blueprint for tax and spending bills called a budget resolution every year, though information technology doesn't ever do so. A budget resolution requires approval of a majority vote in the House and in the Senate (not 60 votes). The president plays no role. The Congressional Budget Human activity permits the use of the reconciliation process only if the House and Senate first concord on a upkeep resolution that includes "reconciliation instructions," that is, dollar targets for committees to raise or lower spending or revenues for a given fiscal year or a period of years. Such resolutions exercise not particular what specific legislative changes a committee should prefer to meet its targets. Afterward the committees finish their work, the upkeep committees in the House and Senate assemble the recommendations into a unmarried charabanc bill—the reconciliation neb. In the House, every bit with whatever legislation, the majority rules. In the Senate, a reconciliation neb requires but a majority. Once both houses agree on this omnibus bill, information technology goes to the president to sign or veto.
How many reconciliation bills can Congress consider in calendar year 2021?
Under usual practice, two: one for fiscal year 2021 (which ends September 30, 2021) and another for fiscal year 2022 (which ends September thirty, 2022). Congress doesn't pass a budget resolution every yr, and it didn't pass one for fiscal year 2021 in the last Congress, largely because at that place was petty chance that the Republican majority in the Senate could come to agreement with the Democratic bulk in the House.
With Democrats in command of both the House and Senate, both houses moved quickly in early February to pass a budget resolution for fiscal year 2021. (Vice President Harris broke a necktie in the Senate.) The resolution cleared the path for a reconciliation nib that enacted President Biden's $i.nine-trillion American Rescue Plan. Information technology extended pandemic-related unemployment benefits, sent $ane,400 per person checks to nearly households, beefed up the public health system, sent aid to state and local governments, and expanded the Child Revenue enhancement Credit. The neb passed the Senate 50-49 (with i Republican not voting). Democrats may craft a 2nd budget resolution (technically for fiscal year 2022) and a second reconciliation bill later on this year, one that would include longer-run elements of Biden's "Build Back Improve" program, including investments in infrastructure and maybe revenue enhancement increases.
In Apr 2021, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough agreed with Senate Democrats that nether the previously obscure Section 304 of the Congressional Budget Act, the Senate can repeatedly revise the budget resolution for the current fiscal yr to create additional reconciliation bills. Democrats may invoke that provision to avoid a filibuster on President Biden'south infrastructure and corporate-tax-increase pecker, the American Jobs Act, and get some version through the Senate with l votes.
Tin can a reconciliation neb increase the budget deficit?
Yes. Although the reconciliation process originally was viewed as a way to reduce budget deficits by cutting projected spending and raising revenues, it has been used to expedite passage of revenue enhancement cuts that increase budget deficits. If reconciliation is used this twelvemonth to enact some version of President Biden'southward COVID relief beak, it will increase budget deficits.
(Hither's a bit of history, provided past budget mavens David Reich and Richard Kogan at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: In 2007, when Democrats took control of the Firm and Senate, both chambers adopted rules designed to prohibit employ of reconciliation for measures that increment deficits. When Republicans took the House in 2011, they replaced the House dominion with one that placed no restrictions on tax cuts that increase deficits but prohibited reconciliation bills that would produce a net increase in spending on Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, farm programs, or other entitlements, oft called "mandatory" spending because they don't involve annual congressional appropriations. That rule was repealed at the offset of the new Congress in 2021. The Senate dominion confronting deficit-increasing reconciliation bills was repealed in 2015.)
Although a reconciliation bill tin can increase near-term budget deficits, there are a couple of wrinkles. A Senate rule says that a reconciliation bill cannot, under congressional scoring, increment the deficit beyond the menses specified in the resolution, commonly ten years. That's why the reconciliation bills that enacted the Bush-league and Trump tax cuts said that some of the revenue enhancement cuts expire earlier the 10th year.
A separate law, the Statutory PAYGO Human activity of 2010, establishes a scorecard to go along rail of the cost of any new mandatory spending or tax changes. A reconciliation bill, such as the 1 Congress may consider for Biden's COVID relief package, would create costs on the PAYGO scorecard for the adjacent 5 years. Under the law, 15 days afterwards a session ends—say, January 15, 2022—the law requires an all-embracing upkeep cut to all mandatory programs (except those specifically exempt, which include Social Security, veterans' benefits, Medicaid, and other major means-tested entitlements) to get-go ane year's worth of costs on the scorecard for fiscal year 2022. So if a pecker costs $2 trillion over 5 years, the average annual impact—$400 billion, in this example—would show upward on the FY2022 scorecard to be squeezed out of Medicare, farm benefits, etc. Congress cannot waive the provisions of the PAYGO Act in a reconciliation bill, only it usually does waive them in some subsequent slice of legislation, i which could crave a 60-vote majority in the Senate.
In add-on, press reports propose that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is considering invoking an obscure provision of the Congressional Budget Act that would substantially re-use the fiscal year 2021 budget resolution to allow for a majority in the Senate to approve Biden's big infrastructure parcel. Never used before, Section 304 says Congress "may prefer a concurrent resolution on the upkeep which revises or reaffirms the concurrent resolution on the budget for such fiscal yr most recently agreed to."
What are the major limits on the use of reconciliation?
One feature of the reconciliation process is the Byrd Dominion in the Senate, named for its chief proponent, the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.). Designed to prevent "extraneous" provisions from benefitting from the expedited reconciliation process, the Byrd Rule gives senators the right to object to any provision that doesn't alter the level of spending or revenues, or 1 for which the alter in spending or revenues is "merely incidental." Initial interpretations of the Byrd Rule are fabricated by the Senate parliamentarian, a non-partisan position.
The Byrd Rule binds only if a senator raises what'south known as a "indicate of order." If one does, information technology takes the consent of threescore senators to overturn a signal of club. Items that are stripped from a reconciliation pecker considering of this dominion are known as "Byrd debris"—and oftentimes are dropped before a bill comes to the floor. The process of deleting those provisions is known every bit a "Byrd bathroom."
Among other things, the Byrd Rule also says that changes to Social Security benefits or Social Security payroll taxes cannot be considered as part of a reconciliation bill.
Many substantive provisions take become Byrd droppings over the years, simply sometimes the rule becomes more of a way for the minority to annoy the majority. During consideration of the 2017 tax cut nib nether reconciliation, for instance, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) objected that a section that gave the police the name "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" was "extraneous" under the Byrd Rule. Equally a result, that proper noun had to exist dropped, and the statute has no plain English title.
What is and isn't allowed nether the Byrd Rule is not always black and white. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programme was created in a reconciliation bill in 1996 considering the rule allows provisions that are not budgetary if they are "terms and conditions" of provisions that are budgetary. The winning argument was that the provision created block grants to states—clearly budgetary—and all the rest constituted "terms and atmospheric condition." The Senate Parliamentarian ruled in late February that the Byrd Dominion precludes including in a reconciliation neb an increase in the minimum wage, disappointing those Democrats who had hoped to include a provision increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour so it would need only 50 votes to pass the Senate.
Source: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/02/05/what-is-reconciliation-in-congress/
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