He’s got an interesting theory about Democrats’ strategy for this year’s budget process. As he pointed out in a floor speech yesterday (pdf), the Senate budget blueprint didn’t include reconciliation instructions, but the House plan did. Such instructions allow tax and entitlement changes to proceed with only a simple majority, thereby nullifying the power of the minority party to stall legislation with a filibuster. But in the House, where there is no filibuster option, legislation already moves by a simple majority.

As Grassley said on the Senate floor yesterday:

Reconciliation is only important for the purposes of the Senate and limiting the role of the minority. I don’t think the other side really wants a debate in the Senate about reconciliation, so they’ve hidden the reconciliation instruction in the House bill so they can drop it in their final budget.

Grassley’s concern is that such an event will set the stage for a highly charged political fight over controversial changes to the Medicare program. House Democrats last year had passed an enormous $90 billion Medicare package, including raises for doctors and an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. But quite aside from the threatened White House veto, the bill never stood a chance in the Senate with the filibuster in effect. With the filibuster option eliminated under reconciliation, however, the contest in the upper chamber would be a much closer one.

Grassley opposed the House Medicare package for numerous reasons (not least of all because it would have cut the subsidies currently enjoyed by the private plans that deliver Medicare services under the Medicare Advantage program, often to rural states like Iowa.) Yet his concern is not that the House Medicare bill has a chance to become law this year (it doesn’t, because reconciliation cannot prevent a presidential veto), but that it would become a political football leading up to a high-stakes presidential election.

So let’s not kid ourselves about including a reconciliation instruction in the final budget. It’s not about making policy. No one should mistake it for a serious effort. It’s about jamming a bill through Congress and forcing the President to veto it. It’s about making politics.

Meanwhile, those Medicare Advantage subsidies took some heat yesterday during a hearing of the House Ways & Means Health Subcommittee. Glenn Hackbarth, head of the independent commission that advises Medicare on payment policy, told lawmakers that MA plans cost more than traditional Medicare but deliver no tangible advantages.

Update: We left out the link to Grassley’s floor speech yesterday. Here it is.