Road Map: Conference Will Host the Real Budget Drama

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To reconcile or not to reconcile, that is the question.

Just because fast-track budget rules are not in the Senate’s $3.5 trillion spending blueprint, that doesn’t mean the fiscal 2010 budget battle in both chambers this week won’t be dominated by a will-they-or-won’t-they debate over including reconciliation instructions to protect health care and education reforms from a filibuster.

And it appears part of the problem is the Senate doth protest too much.

Take, for example, Budget Chairman Kent Conrad’s (D-N.D.) less-than-inspiring promise on Monday to oppose House Democratic leaders’ push to use reconciliation to protect President Barack Obama’s top legislative priorities once the budget gets to a House-Senate conference committee.

“I don’t control the outcome of the conference. You know? I’m a participant, but I don’t control the outcome,” Conrad said. “I’ve stated my strong preference is not to have reconciliation. I will argue that position strongly in conference, but I can’t control the outcome.”

Of course, that conference won’t begin until after both chambers have passed their respective versions — the House on Wednesday or Thursday, the Senate on Thursday or Friday.

Though Senate Democratic centrists have repeatedly expressed indignation at the thought of abandoning “regular order” and bipartisanship in favor of ramming Democratic plans through Congress, it’s difficult to find many willing to state unequivocally that they would oppose any House-Senate conference report with reconciliation in it.

“I want the [bipartisan] process to work,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) said last week. “But if there’s obstructionism involved, you have to take actions to avoid that.”

Others were cagier, but no more willing to draw a line in the sand over setting up a process in which only 51 votes — rather than 60 — would be needed to pass major health care or education reforms. Sen. Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), who co-chairs a newly formed centrist alliance called the Moderate Dems Working Group, declined to say how she would vote if the budget came back with provisions protecting those two priorities.

“It’s really tough,” she said. “This is major, substantive legislation. That’s not what reconciliation was designed for.”

Only Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) has said adding such language would be a “dealbreaker” for him.

Much speculation has centered on the moderate alliance’s meeting today, and whether the 15 Senators in the group will take a unified position on reconciliation before the conference committee meets. Lincoln said she doubted that the bloc would emerge from the meeting with a single policy position. The alliance is expected to hear from Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag today.

Still, Senate leaders can afford to lose a handful of Democrats on the final budget blueprint, and that may be inevitable if it includes reconciliation instructions.

However, it appears that the House sucked out much of the drama over the reconciliation debate by deciding not to protect any climate change legislation in the budget from a filibuster. Eight Democratic Senators, just one shy of the nine needed to completely kill the Democrats’ budget on the Senate floor, signed a letter this month warning party leaders to avoid using the fast-track budget rules for the cap-and-trade energy reforms in the bill.

Republicans, however, argue that the House’s budget instructions are written so vaguely that they might allow Democrats to slip controversial energy provisions into the reconciliation bill that would come up later this year. And they’ve dubbed Obama’s pollution reduction plan a secret “sales tax” on American consumers, because they say it would force utilities to raise rates.

But Democratic leaders have shot that down as a conspiracy theory, particularly since it would likely cause a wholesale revolt among their own centrists.