Republican Reconciliation Strategy “Patently Absurd,” Former Parliamentarian Says

Around the time that I was posting my interview with former Senate Parliamentarian Robert Dove, Greg Sargent reported that Republican senators were planning to stall any attempt at passing health reform through reconciliation with a “free for all of amendments.” Citing a “senior GOP aide,” Sargent writes: He said the leadership — Senators Mitch McConnell, [...]

Reconciling Reconciliation: An Interview with Robert Dove

Robert Dove served as Senate parliamentarian until 2001. The O’Neill Institute’s Lester Feder spoke with him about the reconciliation process and its implications for health reform. Robert Dove: First of all, reconciliation was never designed for something like health care. It’s the reason that it wasn’t used on the original Clinton health-care bill. It’s designed [...]

How to Finish up Health Care Reform: There is Only One Way

The way forward for health care reform at this moment seems rather murky, indeed, one might say grim. Both the House and the Senate had adopted reform legislation prior to Christmas and the game plan going into January was to try to work out an informal agreement between House and Senate leadership that could be [...]

Health Reform in Peril

As a tenured professor, it is easy to take potshots at politicians for their failure to enact health insurance reform legislation. After all, I don’t face angry voters and the need to raise copious amounts of money just to be competitive (the latter made even more treacherous after yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance). [...]

Congressional Power to Regulate Inactivity

[T]here’s pretty much nothing that Congress can’t do and that’s the end of the enumerated power scheme . . . if the Supreme Court were to uphold the Constitutionality of the individual mandate.  So says Randy Barnett in an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition earlier this week, in which he reprised his Heritage Foundation argument. [...]