Earlier today we found out that things weren’t exactly as they seemed last night with regard to the Senate parliamentarian’s supposed ruling on the order in which the health insurance reform and reconciliation bills had to be considered.

Now things are getting muddied again:

Now, however, House Dem leaders appear to have adopted the former view. At her presser today, in a reference to the president,  Nancy Pelosi said:

“People would rather he waited until the Senate acted, but the Senate Parliamentarian said in order for them to do a reconciliation based on the Senate bill, it must be signed by the President.”

Separately, on the House floor today, Eric Cantor pressed Steny Hoyer on the issue, asking Hoyer whether it’s his position that the Senate bill “must be signed into law before the Senate can even take up the reconciliation package.”

“I think the gentleman correctly states the Senate parliamentarian’s position,” Hoyer replied.

Well, no. The gentleman likely did not state the Senate parliamentarian’s position correctly, at least if he thinks the position is that the Senate bill must be signed into law first.

If the House no longer needs the Senate to pass the reconciliation bill first in order to corral House votes for the Senate health insurance reform bill, then that’s one thing. That was the whole aim of laying out this strategy, and if it’s not necessary right now, that puts things in a different light.

But House Democratic leaders should not concede to the Republican position on this, if only to preserve the ability to use this procedure in the future should it ever prove necessary. There’s no reason in the world to surrender this weapon if it’s available to you. You don’t have to use it if it’s unnecessary, but you should never concede its legitimacy. That’s just foolish.

Tom Toles nails it:

It’s a line Democrats would do well to remember.

Republicans have been lying about reconciliation being the “nuclear option” for weeks. So it should come as no surprise that CQ (subscription) now reports:

Republican aides, reporting the decision, interpreted it to mean the House would have to clear the Senate bill and President Obama would have to sign it before the reconciliation bill could be passed. House leaders had been hoping that the two bills could be passed almost simultaneously.

The parliamentarian, however, later reportedly clarified his position to Senate aides, saying that the reconciliation bill could be written in a way that would not require Obama to sign the Senate bill into law before the reconciliation bill is voted on.

Thank you, and have a pleasant day.

If you don’t have a CQ subscription, for now you’ll have to settle for Politico’s story:

[A]ccording to reporting by POLITICO’s David Rogers, the accounts aren’t accurate and misconstrue what the Senate parliamentarians have said. That is that reconciliation must amend law but this could be done without the Senate bill being enacted first. “It is wholly possible to create law and qualify law before the law is on the books,” said one person familiar with situation.

For example, if the big bill itself amends some Social Security statute, reconciliation could be written to do the same –with changes sought by the House. Then if reconciliation is passed and signed by President Barack Obama after he signs the larger bill, the changes made in reconciliation would prevail.
This jives with what Pulse sources were saying soon after the first wave of stories hit – in essence, don’t take the reported parliamentarian’s declaration to the bank.

The latest dispatch from Tokyo Rose McConnell comes via subscription only Roll Call:

The Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that President Barack Obama must sign Congress’ original health care reform bill before the Senate can act on a companion reconciliation package, senior GOP sources said Thursday.

The Senate Parliamentarian’s Office was responding to questions posed by the Republican leadership. The answers were provided verbally, sources said.

It’s amazing that the parliamentarian, who does not talk to the press, is reported by anonymous Republicans to have verbally told Republicans exactly what those Republicans wanted Democrats to hear.

Could it be true? Sure.

But it’s also the opposite of what former Senate parliamentarian Bob Dove said, and he said it on the record:

Dove says the Dems’ planned use of reconciliation is highly unusual. “I’ve never seen a two-bill strategy” where reconciliation is used to fix another piece of legislation, he says. “It’s permissible, I’ve just never seen it.”

Why would he say that? Because the law appears to say so, too:

§ 641. Reconciliation

(a) Inclusion of reconciliation directives in concurrent resolutions on the budget
A concurrent resolution on the budget for any fiscal year, to the extent necessary to effectuate the provisions and requirements of such resolution, shall—
  (1) specify the total amount by which—
         (A) new budget authority for such fiscal year;
         (B) budget authority initially provided for prior fiscal years;
         (C) new entitlement authority which is to become effective during such fiscal year; and
         (D) credit authority for such fiscal year,
contained in laws, bills, and resolutions within the jurisdiction of a committee, is to be changed and direct that committee to determine and recommend changes to accomplish a change of such total amount;

As does the Congressional Research Service (PDF):

Congress and the President could use reconciliation procedures to quickly make any adjustments in existing law or pending legislation that were required to achieve budget policies as they changed between the adoption of the spring and fall budget resolutions.

Could the current Senate parliamentarian just see things the exact opposite of the way the former parliamentarian sees it? And opposite the way the law appears to read? And opposite the way CRS reads it?

Sure.

But Republican Senate aides, who want more than anything to avoid the use of reconciliation, would prefer that you just stop asking. Thanks!

UPDATE: The strongest case, in my view, for what’s purported to be the parliamentarian’s insistence that the reconciliation bill address current law rather than pending legislation is that the instructions authorizing the use of the expedited process contained in the FY10 budget resolution call for “changes in laws,” and not changes in “laws, bills and resolutions” as the Budget Act appears to allow.

I have three more things to say about that:

1. The instructions in the budget are part of a concurrent resolution, which does not have the force of law, whereas the Budget Act is in fact statutory law. Still, the budget resolution is arguably a set of instructions specific to this year and this Congress, whereas the Budget Act is a more general framework.

1. On the other hand, the instructions also call for “changes in laws to reduce the deficit by $1,000,000,000 for the period of fiscal years 2009 through 2014.” Would the parliamentarian disallow a reconciliation bill that reduced the deficit by $2 billion simply because the instructions call for a mere $1 billion? Not likely, and yet this is no more restrictive a reading (especially given the more flexible wording of the Budget Act) than the one he supposedly endorsed today.

1. With all due respect to Senator Conrad, it’s pretty clear that he’d very much like for the House to pass the Senate bill first, and he’s told the press twice before that that was necessary based on two different reasons that haven’t held up all that well under closer examination. First it was the false paradox that you couldn’t pass amendments to a law that “doesn’t exist,” (though as we’ve reasoned, if you believe a law doesn’t exist without the president’s signature, then you can’t believe the amendments exist, either, until they’re signed, so the paradox undoes itself if the bills are signed in the correct order). Then it was the claim that the reconciliation bill couldn’t be ruled on by the parliamentarian until it was scored, and that the reconciliation bill couldn’t be scored until the Senate bill was passed by the House. That turned out not to be true, either, since the Senate bill hasn’t been passed, but the CBO was reported to already be at work on scoring reconciliation.

So it seems at least reasonable to me that we spend some time probing the latest Conrad assertion. At least if we think that having the option of passing reconciliation first helps net Democrats any votes for passage of the Senate bill in the House. If not, then perhaps there’s little point in the exercise. But if there are votes that can be moved this way, then yeah, it probably pays to know what you do and don’t actually have to do.

UPDATE 2: Adriel Bettelheim, Managing Editor at Congressional Quarterly, Tweets this:

Senate parliamentarian telling hill staff that GOP aides misinterpreted his opinion on health care + reconciliation process. #hcr

So, you know, I’m kinda curious about that.

UPDATE 3: CQ (subscription) now reports:

Republican aides, reporting the decision, interpreted it to mean the House would have to clear the Senate bill and President Obama would have to sign it before the reconciliation bill could be passed. House leaders had been hoping that the two bills could be passed almost simultaneously.

The parliamentarian, however, later reportedly clarified his position to Senate aides, saying that the reconciliation bill could be written in a way that would not require Obama to sign the Senate bill into law before the reconciliation bill is voted on.

Joe “You Lie!” Wilson (R-SC-02) on the floor earlier today, discussing the health insurance reform proposal:

On the good side, The Hill today reports, front page, the Senate bill provides for citizenship verification to buy insurance.

Wilson, you’ll recall, screamed out “You Lie!” when President Obama told Congress in an address to a Joint Session that the health insurance reform bill would not offer coverage to illegal immigrants.

And guess what? Today he says it won’t. Well, I’ll be!

So what does a Republican do when forced to eat crow? Pour a little Freedom Ketchup on it! Before even drawing a breath, Wilson concluded his speech with this:

In conclusion, God bless our troops, and we will never forget September 11th and the global war on terrorism.

Uh, yeah.

Markets.

Boy, Republicans will go to any length to maintain their status as the Party of No:

All 41 Republican Senators vowed in a letter today to do everything in their power to kill Democrats’ health care legislation and vote en bloc against procedural motions Democrats want to use to fix the health reform bill passed Christmas Eve by the Senate.

This would include a scenario where the Republican Senators oppose language championed by anti-abortion rights Democrats in the House and side instead with abortion rights defenders.  [...]

“So you’d be voting with Barbara Boxer on an abortion measure?” a reporter asked Sen. Tom Coburn, the OB-GYN and Oklahoma Republican who vehemently opposes abortion rights, at a press conference this afternoon. Boxer, a California Democrat, is a vehement supporter of abortion rights.

“Yes I would. I certainly would,” Coburn said, clarifying that he would oppose a procedural motion in the Senate to allow the stricter ban on federal funding for abortion from being added to the Senate health reform bill.

A couple of things here … first, it looks like Bart Stupak was just tossed under a bus driven by his erstwhile pals across the aisle. And second, add this to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) earlier concern trolling and you can see just how desperate Republicans are to stop a health care bill from reaching the President’s desk.

Wavering and outright obstructionist Democrats need to ask themselves why, if passing health care reform is such an electoral loser like the GOP claims, why are they doing everything in their power to keep it from happening. And more importantly, why are those Democrats helping them?

By Michael J.W. StickingsJon Chait notes that popular support for health-care reform appears to be on the rise, with a new Economist poll “showing a majority (53-47) support for President Obama’s health care plan.” More than that, the trend across poll…

I’m going to take a small snippet of a WaPo article and put it under the Congress Matters microscope:

Democratic leaders huddled Tuesday night in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office for the first of what will probably be many strategy sessions, as Congress tries to complete the year-long health-care reform debate before the Easter recess begins March 26.

Participants said that once the Congressional Budget Office delivers a final cost estimate on the fixes bill, possibly this week, Democratic leaders would begin lining up House and Senate votes.

Wait, wait, wait!

The CBO could be delivering a final cost estimate on the fixes bill as soon as this week?

But, but, but… Kent Conrad said the House had to pass the Senate bill before the CBO could even consider the fixes bill!

Conrad also explained in new detail why he believes that the House must pass the Senate bill first, a view that has been denounced by some critics who want the Senate to pass its fix before the House acts.

Conrad said that under Congressional rules, for a reconciliation fix to be “scored,” it’s not necessary that it become law, but it is necessary for it to have passed both houses of Congress before getting fixed. “For the scoring to change it has to have passed Congress, and that means both houses,” he said.

“The only thing that works here is the House has to pass the Senate bill,” Conrad continued. “Then the House can initiate a reconciliation measure that would deal with a limited number of issues that score for budget purposes.” After that, the Senate would pass the same reconciliation fix, Conrad explained, because even on the fix itself the House must go first because the lower chamber must initiate “revenue bills.”

And yet here we are, with the Senate bill still unpassed by the House, and with no plans to pass it this week, but still the CBO score for the fixes is due any day now.

How did that work, Senator Conrad?  Why would you tell the media in such rigid terms that the order you described was “the only thing that works,” when just days later everyone would be able to see for themselves that it… wasn’t the only thing that worked?

With that in mind, I have to ask, are you the source for the assertion in the WaPo article immediately preceding the cite I began with?

But reconciliation rules seem to indicate that the House will have to pass the Senate bill first. Depending on how the Senate parliamentarian rules, Obama may even have to sign the legislation into law before the Senate can consider the House fixes.

Because I don’t think that’s right, either, and neither does former Senate parliamentarian Bob Dove.

So if you’re the source for that, should we take it with a grain of salt, given what you said about CBO scoring that also turned out to be a wee bit more spin and wishful thinking than rules-based reality?

This process is confusing enough without being misled by the people we’re trusting to get this done. If it’s open to question, then say it’s open to question. The current Senate parliamentarian may well rule just like Conrad thinks he will, but since he’s shielded from the media (as I suppose he should be), you’ll never really know whether his positions are being fairly represented by the Senators who take it upon themselves to assure you that “the only thing that works” is the way they tell you.

The Republican approach to the parliamentary maneuvering is to represent its complexity as reason in itself not to use it. Democrats shouldn’t contribute to this by making ironclad pronouncements about how things really work if they’re not yet sure that’s how they do really work.

Of course McConnell has the Democrats best interests at heart:

As Republicans work to prevent a health-care bill from reaching President Obama, they are scrambling to exploit divisions between Democrats in the House and the Senate.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned House Democrats that they would be taking a colossal risk if they approved the Senate’s version of health-care legislation before the Senate had acted to remove some of the bill’s most contentious provisions …

“House Democrats will have to decide whether they want to trust the Senate to fix their political problems,” McConnell said.

Note to House Democrats: working to prevent a health-care bill from reaching President Obama is the actual basis for McConnell’s concern. FYI.

I’m down in DC’s Dupont Circle for the start of the “Citizen’s Posse” march, ostensibly to make a “citizens’ arrest” of health insurance CEOs meeting (appropriately) at the nearby Ritz-Carlton hotel.

I make the crowd out to be 2,000+ and growing, by what I think is a rather conservative estimate. The Circle itself is jammed, and contingets numbering in the hundreds are arriving from staging areas in all directions.

Howard Dean is on hand under the auspices of Americans United for Change, and I’ve made visual confirmation on that.

CORRECTION: Credit for organizing the event belongs to Health Care for America Now!

Clever use of signage here, with several dozen folks carrying customizable signs that read, “Another ____ for the Public Option,” the blank having been filled in with everything from “healthy voter” to “bleeding heart commie”. Also on hand, of course, drummers, since no protest would be complete without them.

News coverage is sparse, but I’ve seen at least one ABC camera crew, and someone — news, police or otherwise — has deemed it worthy of a chopper overhead.  

Pics, via iPhone as I can manage:

Howard Dean on hand

Crowd sets off

UPDATE: The networks went bonkers for teabagger protests of maybe a tenth this size, but word is there’s almost zero coverage for this rally, which is shoulder to shoulder for a full city block.

Why? I don’t know. It ain’t for lack of cameras. Here’s ABC’s Jonathan Karl on the spot, conducting interviews. Was ABC showing footage? You tell me.

By Michael J.W. StickingsIf there’s one part of Canada that’s right for Sarah Palin, it’s Alberta, our embarrassing bastion of right-wing insanity and one-party Conservative rule. It’s hardly a surprise that she was welcomed so enthusiastically in Calg…

If the House passes the Senate health insurance reform bill before the Congress completes work on the reconciliation fix (and yes, that’s entirely permissible), what then is the incentive for the Senate to hold up its end of the bargain as agreed, and not to try to slip something extra by on the House?

Here’s the scenario I worry about:

1. The House passes Senate bill. That leaves Democrats at least temporarily in the position of having ratified a bunch of stuff they say they don’t like and which even the sponsors of those measures aren’t willing to live with anymore. We’re talking about the “Cadillac tax,” the state-specific deals that came to be known as the “Cornhusker Kickback,” the “Louisiana Purchase,” etc.

1. The House passes the reconciliation fix and sends it to the Senate, as agreed.

1. This is the point where the Senate realizes they have the House over a barrel and can add something that perhaps they want, but know the House doesn’t. The Senate amends the reconciliation bill and sends it back to the House.

1. At this point, under normal circumstances, the House and Senate could move to go to a conference to settle the differences. But the parliamentary motions necessary to go to conference in the Senate are — you guessed it! —  subject to the filibuster. So the differences would likely have to be settled some other way.

1. The House now has a choice: 1) eat it and accept the Senate’s amendment; 2) kill the reconciliation bill and leave House Dems stuck with the ratification of the Nebraska deal, etc., or; 3) try to amend the amended reconciliation bill and send it back to the Senate yet again.

But the Senate knows that the House knows that reconciliation won’t likely survive the Senate twice. It’s quite possible that Senate Republicans could make passing it even once moreof a challengethan Democrats are likely to be comfortable with. That creates an opportunity for the Senate to try to slip something by the House, and force the House to either take the bullet on the Nebraska deal, etc. if they decline to swallow it, or watch them knuckle under yet again and give the Senate what it wants.

What will the Senate want? I don’t know yet. But I hear ideas bouncing around that people aren’t going to like very much, including even more restrictive language on abortion, if you can believe that (though in that scenario, the question of which house wants it more is a lot cloudier).

But why would Senators allow the Nebraska deal to stand? Well, do they care that much? They’ll be on record as being the last house to touch the fix, and as far as the Nebraska deal is concerned, they voted to kill it. It’s not their fault (they’ll say) if they send that fix to the House intact, only to have the House decline to pass it. Their hands are clean!

After watching how Republicans used the negative buzz on the “Cornhusker Kickback” in the special election for the Massachusetts Senate seat, and knowing that the failure to fix the so-called “Cadillac tax” would essentially be spitting in the face of the unions who provide so much in the way of GOTV ground troops, just as we’re heading into one of those traditionally low-turnout mid-term elections, well, there are a lot of reasons to want to be sure nothing goes wrong with this reconciliation bill. Including its use by the Senate as a must-pass vehicle to slip something unwanted past the House.

That’s the problem. The only way for the House to know what it’s getting in the HCR/reconciliation bargain is for the House to wait for reconciliation to be done before passing the Senate HCR bill.

At the very least, having gotten this far with things, the Senate should restrain itself if they’re thinking of gaming the situation, and doing anything other than passing unchanged the reconciliation bill handed to them by the House. And that’d perhaps be something you could count on if reconciliation weren’t such an unpredictable procedure.

But it is.

Wow.

She touched on climate change, saying that her skepticism has been proven by several recent controversies and that money shouldn’t be spent on “pie-in-the-sky, snake-oil ideas.”

The vocal opponent of health care reform in the U.S. steered largely clear of the topic except to reveal a tidbit about her life growing up not far from Whitehorse.

“We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada,” she said. “And I think now, isn’t that ironic.”

Who is “she?”

She is Sarah Palin.

Sarah “Death Panels” Palin. Sarah “Socialism” Palin.

Sarah Palin’s freeloading family used to border-hop for Canadian socialist, single payer, death panel health care for themselves, only to return to the U.S., where she grew up to dedicate herself to denying affordable care to you, largely by hoping you’ll believe that the Canadian health care she crossed the border to get sucks so badly, it’ll kill you.

Oh, not to mention the favorite Republican claim that passing health care reform in this country will supposedly rip off taxpayers by making health care available to border-hoppers!

Who here lives up near the border? How does this work? Was Palin’s family sticking Canadian taxpayers for the bill, or do Americans pay up front for treatment in Canada?

Palin thinks the word for this is “ironic.” I think of it more in terms of “going to Hell.” But that’s just me. Religious freedom and all that.

(h/t to @Will_Bunch)