Congressional Tactic: Reconciliation - Research Paper Example

In a last attempt to implement the reforms, the president hinted on an approach to an up or down vote. The obvious interpretation of this is that the president wants to use the approach used by others before him to pass bills that did not get the majority support. The aim of this report is to discuss the historical aspect of reconciliation as a congress tactic, examples of its use in the past, and the successes or failures of these applications of reconciliation (Mann et al., 2010; Herszenhorn, 2012; Cooper and Herszenhorn, 2010).

A significant loophole existed in the reconciliation process that governments exploited to pass unpopular bills, since reconciliation mentioned changes in revenue and expenditure but did not specify if these changes were increases or decreases. However, in 1975, Russell Long noticed that his tax cut bills were not going through quickly enough, as the members kept proposing amendments to his bills and spent a lot of time discussing them. Russell was disappointed by these two factors, and he figured out that the reconciliation process could be used to: This marked the start in using reconciliation process this way, and since 1980, 17 of 22 reconciliation bills have been signed into law.

The major characteristic of reconciliation bills is that they are structured to reflect their effects on the current budget, debate is limited to 20 hours, and there are supposed to be minimum amendments to the bill, with most amendments happening after presidential assent. Since 1980, democratic and republican governments have used reconciliation bills to push reforms through Congress: College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007 was the only instance where a reconciliation bill was used for non-budgetary purposes, and COBRA of 1986 was the first instance it was used on an issue that touched health policy.

However, in the use of the reconciliation process, congress is limited by the Byrd Rule that limits the use of reconciliation