What’s Reconciliation?
If You Don’t Know, Now You Know: Reconciliation
Reconciliation has become a process that has allowed for the passing of some of the largest budgetary and spending bills in history. These bills have had significant impacts on Black communities across the nation. That is why as part of our political education series, we are explaining and examining this impactful yet generally uncommon political process. Let’s dive in!
What is Reconciliation?
Reconciliation is a process that allows Congress to pass legislation with a simple majority, avoiding the filibuster, a process that requires more than a simple majority to pass legislation. Reconciliation is a process that is limited to budgetary legislation. (House Budget Committee)
To begin the reconciliation process, budget resolutions, that outline the areas of spending in a bill, must pass in both the House and Senate with a simple majority. Once those outlines are set, both the House and Senate use those numbers to build out a specific budget that is voted on and approved. The budgets created by the House and Senate must be identical in order to meet the standards of reconciliation. (Brookings Institution)
Normally, before a bill can get to a vote on the Senate floor, debate in the chamber (or among Senators) must end.—and it takes 60 votes to end the debate. As a result, that is why a 60-vote supermajority is now considered the de facto minimum for passing legislation in the Senate. But Reconciliation changes this! There’s no vote needed to end debate because the debate time is capped at 20 hours, and when it’s done, it’s done. Then it moves onto a final vote where only a simple majority is needed.
What’s the history of Reconciliation?
Reconciliation was introduced in the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 as a method to fast-track legislation related to spending and tax levels. Reconciliation was used for the first time in 1980—and since then, it’s been used to pass 22 pieces of legislation. Reconciliation notably failed in 2017 after an attempt to use the process to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act. Some notable legislation passed through the Reconciliation process are noted below:
- Welfare Reform
- Bush Tax Cuts
- Trump Tax Cuts
- American Rescue Plan
- Deficit Reduction Bills
Right now, it seems as if reconciliation is the only option to make progress in Congress. What prevented the Affordable Care Act from being repealed? Reconciliation. What allowed the COVID stimulus plan to pass the Senate quickly and provide relief for millions of Americans? Reconciliation.
What has been the impact of increasing reconciliation use?
Reconciliation being used more often has been a bit of a double-edged sword. While it has allowed impactful legislation like the American Rescue Plan to pass Congress, it has also been used to pass the Trump Tax Cuts. When a party has governing power of all three legislative and executive bodies (House, Senate, and White House), reconciliation creates an easy path for enacting an economic agenda.
What options are available outside of Reconciliation?
Without Reconciliation, legislation would have to be passed through regular order—which requires a 60 vote minimum to pass in the Senate. Reconciliation has limits and not every policy can be made into law through this process. Oftentimes, rulings from the Senate Parliamentarian determine what can and cannot be included in a Reconciliation package. Due to these limits, Reconciliation cannot completely pass every policy that a President might have campaigned on during an election. However, reconciliation can impact a lot of issue areas that matter to Black communities.
For example, voting rights, criminal justice reform, or civil rights legislation like the Equality Act aren’t policies that fit in the bucket of budgetary policies that reconciliation covers—and as a result, we’re stuck seeing these policies blocked by the 60 vote minimum known as the filibuster. Some advocates argue that voting rights legislation, like the Freedom to Vote Act, warrants an exemption from the filibuster, even if the procedure is not eliminated altogether. Some advocates also argue that civil rights legislation like the Equality Act or the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act should be exempted from the filibuster process and allowed to pass by a simple majority, especially since there already exists a number of exceptions to the filibuster, Stacey Abrams, voting rights champion and former minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, argues, “Protection of democracy is so fundamental that it should be exempt from the filibuster rules.”
Where can I learn more about reconciliation?
Check out some of these additional resources:
- What is Reconciliation in Congress? (Brookings Institution)
- What is Reconciliation and How does it help Congress pass legislation? (NBC News Now)
- Budget Reconciliation: The Basics (House Budget Committee)