Reply #6: Bush tax cuts for example are due to expire 2011

[SpartanDem]

they were passed under reconciliation. Sometimes we talk about budget reconciliation, which is what it's really called, as if were some magic procedure that let's us use 51 votes. Reconciliation was not meant to pass substantive legislation so for parts of the bill not effecting the budget the GOP could a file motion and if the Senate Parliamentarian finds then to be not germane they would stripped out of the bill.

Under the 1974 Congressional Budget Act, reconciliation bills were given special Senate protection and allowed to pass by simple majority votes, after limited debate, to give senators the ability to make the kinds of tough decisions required to cut the deficit.

At the same time, Senator Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat and longtime protector of the prerogatives of the Senate, came up with a complex set of rules intended to impede those who would dare to use reconciliation to rewrite federal policy rather than produce budget savings.

Under the Byrd rule, provisions where the fiscal consequences are “merely incidental” to the true intent of the legislative provisions can be stricken from the bill unless 60 senators vote to waive the rule. Reconciliation measures are traditionally scoured for such provisions, in what is known around the Senate as giving the bill a “Byrd bath.”

Because Republicans would most likely be so incensed that Democrats were trying to force through a sweeping health plan by simple majority vote, they would no doubt challenge many elements of the bill and could strip them out.



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/us/politics/02hulse.html