Max Baucus makes a misleading claim about the effect of the use of the reconciliation process on the sustainability of health care reform in today’s New York Times:
Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Finance Committee, said Friday that he would prefer not to pursue health legislation through the reconciliation process.
“I think it gets in the way,” Mr. Baucus said, explaining that his goal was to produce a health care bill that could “get significantly more than 60 votes.”
“If we jam something down somebody’s throat, it’s not sustainable,” he said.
In fact, however, the reality is that the status quo is privileged in the American system of government. While it would certainly be possible to overturn a health care bill passed under reconciliation, doing so would require a significant shift in the configuration of the House, Senate, and the presidency. Assuming that reconciliation wasn’t used by a future Republican majority in the Senate to overturn the health care plan, you would need a Republican House majority, a Senate in which the 41st most liberal senator (Claire McCaskill in the 110th Congress) prefered overturning the plan to the status quo, and the election of a Republican president who would not veto the bill. The Senate condition would be somewhat more likely to occur with a more liberal bill, which is the likely result of the use of reconciliation, but it’s hardly a trivial condition.
(To specify this more precisely, you could use a gridlock zone model of the sort developed by Keith Krehbiel, David Brady, and Craig Volden, but assume that the pivotal voters on the bill under reconciliation would be the median members of the House and Senate rather than the filibuster pivot in the Senate. You would then compare the configurations necessary for reversing the bill to the case in which the filibuster pivot in the Senate is the pivotal voter.)
Update 4/27 7:59 AM: Corrected to note the obvious necessity of a Republican House majority to overturning any Democratic health care bill.