Why Using Reconciliation Isn't So Bad

On Tuesday, David Brooks wrote a column in The New York Times about the rapidity of Obama's decline in opinion polls. Toward the end of the piece, he wrote the following, which caught my attention:

Some now argue that the administration should just ignore the ignorant masses and ram health care through using reconciliation, the legislative maneuver that would reduce the need for moderate votes. This would be suicidal. You can't pass the most important domestic reform in a generation when the majority of voters think you are on the wrong path. To do so would be a sign of unmitigated arrogance. If Obama agrees to use reconciliation, he will permanently affix himself to the liberal wing of his party and permanently alienate independents. He will be president of 35 percent of the country─and good luck getting anything done after that.

I hate to quibble with a figure as prescient and erudite as Brooks, but on this, I'm unconvinced. I wonder what is more damaging to the White House at this stage: using reconciliation to pass health care or having the health-care debate continue to dominate the news for weeks, maybe even months? Rather than getting closer to an agreement, the past few weeks have driven an even bigger wedge between Democrats and Republicans on health care. Every week that the health-care quarrel remains in the headlines seems to be another week where the president's approval rating drops. The debate has become bitter and is increasingly unproductive. Perhaps the thing the president needs most is for the debate to end, and the swiftest way for that to happen is to use reconciliation and pass a bill. Given the abundance of misinformation and confusion surrounding health-care reform right now, I can't imagine that using reconciliation would be damaging to the president than having this health-care row continue until Christmas.

Brooks's argument is that using reconciliation would forever alienate those centrists and independents who were critical to his election in the first place. But would it? Does the public ever really remember how a bill got passed? Or is the overwhelming impression simply whether the president succeeded or failed at implementing reforms? President Bush used reconciliation to pass his tax cuts, but I don't recall liberals screaming about the process at the next election. Sure they were steamed about the tax cuts themselves, but the way they were passed was all but forgotten.

The president is in need of a win. He needs the health-care debate─which has proved so toxic to his approval ratings and his credibility─to come to an end, and quickly. While I don't have a crystal ball, I imagine that most voters will be swayed more by whether they believe his reforms are working than the Senate process employed to pass the legislation. The president's opponents will likely be more concerned with criticizing his policies than getting people riled up about an arcane Senate procedure. And the president, for his part, will have something concrete to show his supporters. Reconciliation, which requires a simple majority rather than 60 votes, alleviates the need to appease moderates like Ben Nelson, so Democrats may craft a bill that invigorates their base more than the proposal likely to come out of the ailing Gang of Six, and an energized base is better for the president's political prospects than one that has heard months of nonstop criticism about the president's agenda stalling. 

Reconciliation isn't ideal, and it's unclear which reforms could even be considered under it. But it isn't suicidal either. Health policy passed through reconciliation will likely garner 54 to 57 votes, which doesn't exactly constitute despotic behavior in most people's minds. It's a majority. It's a bigger majority than the one that passed Bush's 2003 tax cuts, which required the vice president to step in and break a tie. And Bush still won a second term. Will reconciliation cause a furor for a few weeks? Very possibly. But it won't be the death of his presidency. Failing to pass heath-care reform at all, well, that's a different story.