Health Care Reconciliation

Floor Speech

Mr. STEARNS. Madam Speaker, in 1974, Congress passed the Congressional Budget Act. This law created an optional procedure we know as the budget reconciliation process. The chief purpose of the reconciliation process was to enhance Congress' ability to change current law in order to bring revenue and spending levels into alignment with the budget resolution. That is a definition of a reconciliation bill, to control government spending; not to enact new policies.

The last reconciliation bill passed by Congress was in the year 2007. This process was first used in 1980, and in 1985, Senator Robert Byrd had the Senate adopt a temporary rule to curb the practice of using reconciliation as a vehicle to move extraneous materials outside of the budget process. This rule is known today as the Byrd Rule. The Byrd Rule has been extended and modified over the years and in 1990 was made permanent when Congress amended the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

Now, under the Byrd Rule, a senator who is opposed to the inclusion of extraneous material in the reconciliation bill may offer an amendment or a point of order to strike that provision. The Byrd Rule defines six provisions of what constitutes extraneous matter. The three most important provisions are, one, the bill language must produce a change in outlays or revenues; two, the bill cannot increase the deficit for fiscal years beyond the budget window; three, the provision is a nonbudgetary component that has a fiscal effect outside of the Treasury.

So today, Madam Speaker, the House Budget Committee will be meeting to markup a Budget Reconciliation Bill. Despite the House not having done a budget for the fiscal year 2011, the Budget Committee is going forward with reconciliation authority from last year's budget. The reconciliation process is being used to pass a Senate-passed health care bill in the House and to get the Senate to amend the reconciliation bill or law without fear of a filibuster.

Now, the press is reporting that the Rules Committee will report a rule that will deem the Senate health care bill as passed with the adoption of the rule and we only have a chance to debate and vote on the budget reconciliation. This is outrageous and absurd. The majority will claim that they will only be voting on the rule, when in fact they will be voting on accepting the Senate bill. Last year, the House was passing bills without reading them. This year, they're passing bills without voting on them.

This 2,309-page document makes a mockery of the entire budget reconciliation process. This monstrosity will be used to force a Senate health care bill reform on the American people who have spoken up loudly and spoken up to reject its backroom deals and special interest giveaways. Yet the Democratic leadership will ask its members to vote for the rule which will self-enact the Senate bill, the entire health care bill, in the hope that the Senate Democrats will vote later for reconciliation that the Senate parliamentarians will uphold the provisions inside the reconciliation bill which includes a self-enacting rule vis-a-vis health care bill.

Now, this is my understanding. There is no precedent for what the Democrats are doing with this deception. There has never been a reconciliation process as corrupt as what is happening this week. We have never written a reconciliation bill to amend a law that does not exist. We have never had a reconciliation bill with so far a reaching scope. This bill would seek to alter one-sixth of our economy permanently.

Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Father and author of the first Senate rules, states, ``The minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.'' The Democrats are violating the minority rules by this procedure. If the Byrd Rule applied to the House, we would never be able to pass the budget reconciliation.

This bill, these tactics being used, goes way too far. It undermines the process of creating laws, the right to offer amendments, and the right to vote on a bill. It may not be politically safe for the majority, but we should have a proper vote, up-and-down, on this health care bill and an ability to amend the Senate bill. As legislators, we were sent here by our constituents to vote, not to hide. The proposed rule and the Budget Reconciliation Bill undermine our rights enumerated within the Constitution.

So I urge the Democrat majority to rethink the whole procedure for bringing up the Senate health care bill. Enacting a rule which includes health care will mean that once it passes the House it will go directly to the President. It will not return to the Senate. The President will sign it and it will become law. This is what they intend contrary to the transparency they promised.

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