budget reconciliation

The New Mexico Independent’s Marjorie Childress attended a town hall meeting yesterday in Albuquerque featuring Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) — a member of the so-called “Gang of Six” senators at the center of negotiations over the Senate Finance Committee’s pending health care reform bill. Bingaman said access to “decent affordable health care” was a “human [...]

Many conservatives live in fear of the Democrats’ plans for health care reform, and they’ve been proportionately critical of the possibility that Democratic leaders will lean on reconciliation — the budget procedure that prevents filibusters — to get it done.
But not Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Speaking to ABC News today, Ryan, who’s the senior Republican [...]

The prospects for congressional approval of climate change legislation this year have dimmed but not disappeared. Yesterday the Senate voted against using the filibuster-proof reconciliation process to consider climate change legislation by a 67-31 vote and the House-approved budget did not include cap-and-trade in its budget reconciliation provisions.

All 41 Republican senators have signed an open letter asking Democratic leadership not to use the filibuster-proof reconciliation process to pass health care reform, a sure sign that the threat of reconciliation, which would allow the Senate to pass a health care reform bill with 51 votes instead of 60–issued again yesterday by Secretary of [...]

Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag kept up the pressure on Senate Republicans over the weekend by continuing to raise the possibility that the White House may use the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process to pass comprehensive health care reform if the Republicans don’t show more flexibility.
From a Bloomberg report on Saturday.

Democrats probably won’t decide [...]

In what The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim calls a “big boost for climate change,”  Sens. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) and John McCain (D-Ariz.) today endorsed the idea of  ”cap-and-trade” system to reduced carbon emissions. When President Obama offered his proposal for a cap and trade system last month, even Republicans who had supported the idea last [...]