Reconciliation

Jonathan Chait writes about Reconciliation: Obsessed Or Ignorant, Pick One. First he explains how reconciliation would be used: "Now their plan is to have the House pass the Senate bill, and then use reconciliation to patch up the bill. That means enacting a handful of relatively modest changes to the Senate bill, changes that would be budget related. This would not be some unprecedented use of reconciliation. As uses of reconciliation go, it would actually be quite minor, applying small changes to a health care bill that’s already been passed."

Then he rips apart a Face the Nation exchange and Politico's reporting of it. "Look, it would be okay for reporters and pundits to be obsessed with what legislative method is employed to pass health care reform if they boned up on the issue. Alternatively, it would be okay for them not to understand it at all if they deemed it an irrelevant issue. (Which, in my opinion, it is.) But obsessed and ignorant makes for a bad combination."

Liz Halloran of NPR interviews Robert Dove, retired Senate Parliamentarian on more details of reconciliation.