TOM DASCHLE AND BUDGET RECONCILIATION.

I didn't include these two questions in the original interview transcript because I wanted to use them for a later article I was thinking of writing on the reconciliation process -- the process by which a procedural rule can be invoked to shut down the filibuster and pass policies with budgetary implications by a simple majority -- and health care. I never quite got around to it. But they're worth putting up now:

Ezra Klein: Many of these ideas, some similar, some not, have fallen by the wayside. Why would this get to 60? Or 50, depending on whether it can go to budget reconciliation?

Tom Daschle: This would only succeed if we learn lessons from the past. And there are so many lessons to learn. You know, one of the lessons of the past that we should learn is we gotta broaden the coalition as much as possible. I think our potential for broadening the coalition this time is really great. I think there’s a lot more interest in it. Secondly, I think we’ve got to realize that there are not one but three categories of health problems: access, quality and cost. All three have to be dealt with, and all three have different constituencies. And so we have to address the constituencies where the political problems lie. With the doctors, it’s going to be malpractice. With patients, it should be quality and cost. With businesses, it’s going to be cost. So we’ve got to go right to the heart of what is the core concern for these core constituencies and try to address it. Third, we’ve got to have a lot more transparency. We have to break the myth, we have to put opponents of change on the defensive. In the past, it’s been proponents of change who’ve been on the defensive. We have to turn the tables. And as I said, procedurally, we have to use reconciliation to bring the threshold from 60 down to 50 votes.

EK: Why do you think you can use reconciliation when it was nixed by Robert Byrd and others in 1993?

TD: Two reasons. First, our Republican friends have done us a favor in one respect. By using reconciliation in the past for all kinds of public policy issues, including the passage of ANWR,, that has been a White House as well as a Republican majority attitude that reconciliation is an appropriate vehicle. They’d be hard-pressed to argue now that it isn’t. The second is more important. There are huge fiscal consequences for what we do on health care, it’s now a fifth of our economy. It’s 2.3 trillion dollars. We spend more on health care than we do on almost any other thing in the country. So how we address health care, what we spend on medicare, what we spend on Medicaid, if we’re going to keep those programs, how we look at overall expenditures, clearly is clearly going to be affected by this.

Daschle made similar comments at a recent appearance with Jonathan Cohn. The idea here is not that reconciliation is where you start, but that you make clear it's where you're willing to end. As I've said before, Congress is weird in that though the minority might believe that killing a bill is their first best option, their second best option is not voting ineffectually against it. It's good to oppose a failure, but not a success. Their second best option is often to vote for the bill and get their priorities included, or ensure their constituencies are cared for. So if it's clear that the Democrats can pass the legislation -- that they can go to reconciliation and ram it through on a party line vote -- it becomes less likely that they'll need to use reconciliation. The threat of 50 votes can give you an outcome of 70 votes, because it changes the incentive structure. The threat might well be enough. And with Daschle having signaled his willingness to use reconciliation and Max Baucus having told me that he's willing to use reconciliation, the threat is certainly live.

(For those really interested in budget reconciliation, the other major player is Kent Conrad, chair of the Budget Committee. He'll set many of the rules around reconciliation, and to my knowledge, he's not said much publicly on the subject.)