Senate Parliamentarian Rules That Democrats Can Pass Another Reconciliation Bill

Democrats were able to pass the American Rescue Plan Act along party lines in March because of reconciliation, a rule that allows Congress to pass a budget resolution with new spending priorities with a simple majority in the Senate. The fiscal year runs from April 1-March 31, so technically the ARPA was passed as a 2020 reconciliation bill with the 2021 fiscal year reconciliation bill tagged for infrastructure. Initially, it was believed that, after ARPA, the only budget-reconciliation bill that Democrats could pass would be one for the 2021 fiscal year. However, this week, the nonpartisan Senate parliamentarian announced that Congress can utilize this process more than once in a fiscal year,freeing the possibility of further legislative packages to pass without Republican support.

As a reminder, Democrats can use the reconciliation process to bypass the filibuster. The Senate cloture rule requires 60 senators to end debate on most topics and move to a vote through regular order. A reconciliation budget bill does not need to adhere to this rule, allowing a party with a slim majority to pass legislation with a simple majority of 51 votes. With the current makeup in the Senate, this method of passing legislation requires all 50 Democrats to vote with their party and for Vice President Kamala Harris to then cast the tie-breaking vote. Democrats cannot pass anything they want in such a bill; for example, the original version of the American Rescue Plan included an incremental increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour, but the Senate parliamentarian ruled that a minimum-wage increase cannot be included in a reconciliation bill. All provisions in a budget-reconciliation bill must be related to revenue, spending and the federal debt limit.

What would Democrats pass in a second reconciliation bill? President Biden has shifted the focus in recent days from COVID-19 relief to infrastructure, eyeing an ambitious $2 trillion in spending that the Administration claims would be a “once-in-a-generation investment” in the U.S. The “Build Back Better” plan includes funding for public transit, electric vehicles, high-speed broadband, roads and bridges, affordable housing, power grids and more. Some of this spending does impact healthcare and public health, including $18 billion for VA hospitals and $400 billion to expand Medicaid beneficiaries' access to home- and community-based care for seniors and the disabled. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has also floated the idea of using reconciliation to pass legislation focused on immigration.

The two linchpins in Democrats’ plan will be Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), the moderate swing votes in the Senate who may not be on board with whichever proposal the Democrats plan on passing through reconciliation. Without a “yea” from Manchin and Sinema, they will not have the 51 votes required and their reconciliation strategy will collapse. Manchin wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post on Wednesday in which he raised concern about plans to move Biden’s infrastructure agenda through the budget-reconciliation process, and instead urged his party to work with Republicans. “We should all be alarmed at how the budget-reconciliation process is being used by both parties to stifle debate around the major issues facing our country,” he wrote.

Despite Manchin’s plea, the current impression in Washington is that bipartisan cooperation for another immense legislative package is unlikely. But the budget-reconciliation process does allow Congress to potentially break the package into smaller bills, which may have a higher likelihood of garnering conservative support.

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Republicans need to stop complaining and fucking start fighting this shit.