When Judd Gregg, a Republican senator from New Hampshire, described a possible Democratic strategic maneuver as “the Chicago approach to governing: Strong-arm it through… You’re talking about running over the minority, putting them in cement and throwing them in the Chicago River,” one would have reason to worry. What were these sundry Democrats planning? Did it really merit comparison to Mayor Daley and his gang of corrupt city officials and mobsters? The truth, of course, was a tad less exciting — he was really talking about an obscure parliamentary maneuver in the Senate known as “budget reconciliation.”
So, what is “reconciliation” and why does Judd Gregg associate it with nasty, tyrannical urban politicians?
The process begins each year when Congress passes a budget resolution. This resolution is approved by a majority vote in the House and Senate, and never goes to the president to be signed. Instead of a normal piece of legislation, the resolution only governs Congress’s spending by setting out “how much Congress is supposed to spend in each of 19 broad spending categories … how much total revenue the government will collect, for each of the next five or more years.” So, any appropriations, tax cuts or other spending ventures are supposed to fall within the guidelines of that resolution.
With reconciliation, things get a bit more tricky. Since the budget resolution only requires a majority vote to pass, while contentious bills in the Senate need 60 votes to end debate and then have a majority vote, a determined minority can obstruct the majority’s budget and spending priorities. Since 2006, for example, the Republican minority has taken advantage of Senate rules to block legislation on numerous occasions. They do this by forcing Democrats to call for an end of debate on a bill, essentially threatening a filibuster (a process called invoking cloture), and then having the cloture invocation fail because the Democrats don’t have 60 votes to end debate. And so the bill never passes, and the Republicans (or whichever party is in the minority) successfully obstruct the majority’s preferences.
And while there may be a role for minorities to check the preferences of the majority, things have gotten a bit out of hand. Since 2006, when Democrats took power in both houses of Congress, Republicans have turned the filibuster, and the subsequent failed call for 60 votes to end debate, from a parliamentary maneuver only used in special circumstances to a banal, routine bit of legislative strategy. No more reading from phone books, just boring obstruction. Or, to put it in crude, numerical terms, “As of the end of the first session of the 110th Congress, there were 60 cloture motions, nearing an all-time record.”
This is where Gregg’s clumsy reference to the Windy City makes a little bit more sense. What Democrats and their allies have been murmuring about, budget reconciliation, is a way to bypass the threat of a Republican filibuster and only require 50 votes to pass a piece of legislation. Remember the Congressional Budget Resolution? The special bill that only needs a majority vote to pass? What the budget reconciliation would do is allow the majority to bypass normal procedures for debate and vote on a bill -– by only having 20 hours of debate and forcing a simple majority vote at the end -– and more effectively implement their agenda.
So, is this majoritarian tyranny, the rule of the few by the many? Does Harry Reid really want to throw Judd Gregg into the Chicago river?
Well, if budget reconciliation is majority tyranny, then we really ought to have more of it. As of now, if you live in a populous state, you’re disadvantaged by the American legislative system. Moreover, if you live in a populous state which is either left or right of center, you’re double screwed. Here’s why:
Every bill must go through the Senate, which has all sorts of choke points that allow even the smallest minorities to delay and even prevent passage of a bill. One of them is the modern day filibuster, which doesn’t even require the Jimmy Stewart theatrics of old, while another are anonymous “holds” that individual senators can put on bills or nominations to frustrate their passage. The cumulative effect of these barriers to legislation is to essentially disenfranchise voters who voted for the party in the majority, which faces yet another barrier to seeing its agenda passed. Add this to the systemic under-representation (California, with around 34 million people has as many senators as Wyoming, which has a mere population of 522,830 people), and the Senate starts looking like a strange, even anti-democratic institution.
The important effect of this bizarre anti-majoritarianism is that it makes real politics incredibly difficult. When American voters, in consecutive elections, turned control over of both houses of Congress to the Democrats and elected a Democratic president by a 7 percent margin, they showed a clear shift towards Democratic policies. But because of the strange acceptance of 60 votes as the bar to end debate, the fate of that agenda which voters approved now rests on the shoulders of a few figures – Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Evan Bayh of Indiana and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. These senators, straddling the border between conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, end up wielding an unfair amount of power, essentially deciding the fate of certain bills. And when Democrats even talk about restoring the Senate to regular majority votes for something like health care reform, Republicans hyperventilate and call it “a declaration of war.”
Ultimately, the fight over filibusters, budget reconciliation and obstruction is about whether or not our elected representatives and our democratic institutions are responsive to the wishes of voters. Every time the Republicans defeat a cloture motion and every time that Democrats are cowed from using budget reconciliation to pass popular policies, voters lose. But that isn’t what a representative democracy is about, is it?