Barring a last-minute deal with Senate Republicans, congressional Democrats are taking steps to move a coronavirus relief bill quickly through Congress, relying only on their own votes. The procedures they will follow are a bit arcane and likely to get misunderstood in some popular media accounts. Accordingly, some explanation seems worthwhile. This post will cover the first half of the process: passage of a budget resolution. A subsequent post will explain the actual enactment of a coronavirus relief bill.
The device Democrats will use is “budget reconciliation.” Originally designed to ease passage of unpopular deficit reduction measures, Republicans long ago persuaded the Senate parliamentarian that its expedited, filibuster-proof procedures should be available for deficit-increasing legislation. Most recently, Republicans increased the deficit $1.9 trillion over ten years when they pushed the 2017 tax law through under reconciliation procedures. Reconciliation procedures are skewed somewhat toward deficit reduction, but a determined majority can overcome that tilt to pass legislation that raises the deficit.
The term “reconciliation”
does not refer to human amiability – some reconciliation battles would make
Hobbes blush – but rather to the reconciliation of tax and spending laws with a
plan laid out in a concurrent budget resolution. Passage of a budget resolution therefore is a
prerequisite to invoking reconciliation procedures.
Like budget
reconciliation legislation, a budget resolution is fully protected against
filibusters and partially protected against amendments on the Senate
floor. (The House leadership can, and
typically does, completely foreclose floor amendments through its control of
the Rules Committee.) Because the budget
resolution is not destined to become law – it adjusts internal congressional
procedures and so is not presented to the President for signature – its most
significant feature is a seemingly endless array of numbers representing how
much may be spent on each broad government function and how much may be spent within
the jurisdiction of each congressional committee. The former are not binding; the latter are.
Deciphering these
numbers requires knowing what baseline estimates the Congressional Budget
Office has made about spending levels.
If the budget resolution’s figures for a committee are higher than the
CBO baseline, that committee may report out legislation increasing spending by
the difference. If a committee’s total
in the budget resolution is less than the CBO baseline, the resolution is
asking that committee to cut programs within its jurisdiction by that amount and
creating a point of order against spending legislation from that committee that
fails to bring the committee into conformity with the budget resolution’s
expectations.
A budget resolution
can go further and issue “reconciliation instructions” to committees, requiring
them to report out legislation to change the spending or revenues within their
jurisdiction. Committees invariably
comply with reconciliation instructions because failure to adhere to a
reconciliation instruction can cede jurisdiction to the budget committee to
craft legislation; that is unlikely to be an issue this year with the
instructions calling for increases.
A committee that
does not receive a reconciliation instruction may not submit content to be
included in the reconciliation bill. This
evening, the House Budget Committee released its budget
resolution, with reconciliation instructions for the Committees on Agriculture,
Education and Labor, Energy and Commerce, Financial Services, Foreign Relations,
Natural Resources, Oversight and Reform, Science, Space and Technology, Small Business,
Transportation and Infrastructure, Veterans’ Affairs, and Ways and Means. Although the House Budget Committee’s report
will explain what legislative changes it is assuming each committee will make –
the amounts of the reconciliation instructions are the cost of those changes –
the committees may propose any changes within their jurisdiction that meet the
targets they are given.
A budget resolution
can, and the House’s proposed budget resolution does, include “reserve funds”. Contrary to their name, these are not
actually pools of money but rather a procedural device to allow other fiscal
legislation to avoid budgetary points of order so long as it is deficit-neutral. It is unclear if the proposed budget
resolution’s reserve funds represent any particular legislation that Members
have in mind.
Because the
Democrats’ margins in each chamber are so narrow, the terms of the budget
resolution and the broad outlines of the ultimate reconciliation legislation
have been negotiated carefully between the leadership of each chamber, with
Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Schumer coordinating with their respective Members
to ensure that the necessary votes will be available. The last time Democrats controlled both chambers
they did not attempt such advance negotiations; Members became inflexibly
committed to inconsistent positions and no resolution was passed. This time, all Democrats’ commitment to enact
coronavirus relief legislation is driving them to work out their agreements before
anyone becomes dug in.
Because the House
Rules Committee, which is wholly controlled by the majority leadership, sets
the rules for floor consideration, passage in the House will be relatively
straightforward – and fast. The Budget Committee
will take up and approve the budget resolution on a series of party-line votes
February 2. The Rules Committee will
send the budget resolution to the floor later that day. The resolution will come to the House flood
February 3 and will pass that day, likely by a pure party-lines vote.
Consideration in
the Senate is longer and messier. The
Senate also is likely to start its consideration of the budget resolution on
February 3. The Congressional Budget Act
allows
fifteen hours of debate on the Senate floor.
This likely will expire late Thursday.
Once it does, the Senate will begin an unpleasant process known as “vote-a-rama”
to dispose of all remaining germane amendments that have been filed. Typically, the Senate will agree by unanimous
consent to extend debate by one minute each for the amendment’s author and an
opponent (commonly the chair of the Budget Committee). Senators then vote with little other
information on the amendment.
Only germane
amendments may be offered. To be
germane, an amendment must change one or more of the numbers in the proposed
budget resolution. If Republicans seek
to shrink the ultimate relief bill, they could try to reduce the amounts of new
spending allowed by the reconciliation instructions.
Other amendments
are largely expressive. For example, a
senator wishing to put the Senate on record as opposing the building of another
aircraft carrier might file an amendment titled “To educate our children
instead of building needless weapons” that makes an arbitrary reduction in the
spending assumed for the Defense function and a corresponding increase in the
spending assumption for the Education function.
Because these functional assumptions are not binding, such an amendment
technically does not constrain the ultimate legislation. Nonetheless, committees typically hesitate to
propose legislation inconsistent with an adopted floor amendment. Both Democrats and Republicans are likely to offer
such “message amendments”, both to put themselves on record on issues important
to them and to try to embarrass their opponents.
The vote-a-rama
likely will last until the wee hours of Thursday night or Friday morning. Once it is complete, the resolution will go
back to the House. The House is staying
in town this coming weekend so that it can repass the budget resolution with
whatever amendments the Senate adopted.
This will get a final budget resolution in place by the end of the
weekend, allowing the various committees to start work on their components of
the reconciliation bill as early as February 8.
If the House and Senate were to resolve their differences in a
conference committee, the process might slow down by as much as two weeks.
This schedule,
although ambitious, could allow Congress to put relief legislation on the
President’s desk by the end of February or very early March.
Even if the
Democrats gain sixty votes in the Senate from an agreement with the group of
Republicans that has sought negotiations with President Biden, it is far from
clear that they could move legislation any faster: even though sixty votes is enough eventually
to suppress a filibuster, Senate rules force several votes to make that happen,
with considerable floor time consumed leading up to each vote.
@DavidASuper1