This passage in the WSJ’s editorial this morning backed me up, since I had been under the impression that once the House pretends to pass this monstrosity, the ballgame is over:
While the Democratic strategy is already a wholesale abuse of the traditional reconciliation process, it now bids to violate the actual rules of reconciliation as well.
In a carom shot if there ever was one, the excise tax on gold-plated health coverage has received one last tweak. It is expected to fund ObamaCare as employees take more of their compensation in wages rather than health insurance, thus exposing more income to ordinary taxes. The House demand to delay that tax until 2018 from 2013 in the Senate bill—to appease the likes of AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, who met one-on-one with Mr. Obama on Wednesday—therefore reduces Social Security payroll tax revenues. But reconciliation expressly forbids such changes to Social Security, and CBO says this change will drain some $53 billion from the program’s trust fund.
Senate Republicans will therefore be entitled to raise a budget “point of order” against the entire reconciliation bill if it does arrive in the upper chamber. That will let them strip out the offending provision—which will offend the labor movement, to say the least—or even send the entire bill back to the House, forcing another round of agony on the gullible rank-and-file.
North Dakota Senator Kent Conrad admitted the risks yesterday, asking rhetorically if he expected that some GOP “challenges will be upheld? Yeah. I do.”
The editors then go on to describe yet another disgraceful bribe for North Dakota (an exemption from Big Brother’s student loan take-over), but I don’t want to get sidetracked.
I was under the impression that the sham here is that the House is passing (or “deeming” passed) the Senate Obamacare bill, and thus that once the House acts there is nothing more for the Senate to do — the bill purportedly approved by both chambers goes straight to Obama’s desk. Is that not so?