The Monkey Cage

The statistical problem with your analysis is that the numbers is dominated by Reagan’s 7 bills and imbalanced by time. Even considering that, though, Reagan and the two Bushes signed 0.55 reconciliation bills per year in office, whereas Clinton signed 0.5 per year. Viewed that way, the difference seems insignificant.

Viewed another way, the contentious parts of Reagan and Bush (43)’s reconciliation bills were mostly tax cuts — which are budgetary issues that reconciliation was originally intended to address. Many of the contentious open issues in the health care bills are related to policy issues (like the Stupak amendment, the Cornhusker kickback, and the union buy-out).

One counter-example to welfare reform are the COBRA health care benefits. COBRA was (as far as I can tell) the reconciliation bill for the 1986 fiscal year budget. That was under Reagan, but seems to advance traditionally Democratic objectives.

Another problem with our oversimplified “analysis” is that Democrat Presidents were in office only 56% of the time Republicans held office during that period.

Good idea to test the various claims about reconciliation.

But I probably would not code responsibility for reconciliation by the party of the president. I’d probably want to take account of the pattern of reconciliation bills under unified and divided party control. The president can’t dictate the decision to pursue a reconciliation bill.

That said, in the split Congress years (1981-86, 2001-2), “ownership” of reconciliation is far less clear.

Also, I don’t have the CRS report at hand, but I recall some years in which reconciliation bills failed short of a presidential veto. Might want to code reconciliation attempts as well.

Some of the uses of reconciliation during the 1980’s reinforce Sarah’s point about the difficulty of assigning responsibility for reconciliation during divided government. Reconciliation was used repeatedly during the 80’s to make substantive changes to health care. See the CQ Weekly article, “Budget-Cutting Measuring a Favorite Vehicle: Major Health Policy Changes Proposed in Reconciliation Bill” (Julie Rovner, Aug. 2, 1986). Although the impetus for the bills was deficit reduction, substantive changes to policy were made.

Some of the discussion in CQ articles focuses on proposed changes that were dropped during conference negotiations. Of particular note was language requiring states to set up risk pools to expand coverage (CQ Weekly, “The 99th Congress Legislative Summary: Health,” Oct. 25, 1986). Sound familiar? This provision did not make it into the reconciliation bill that became law for 1987.

So, substantive (not having to do with deficit reduction) changes were made and some proposed substantive changes were removed through negotiations. What does all this say about who was responsible for the substantive changes? That would probably require a lot more reading—maybe the best way of doing it is identify the supporters of individual provisions, though that’s probably not possible given the amount of information in CQ’s coverage (note, I think CQ’s coverage was great but it didn’t extend to identifying each sponsor of each provision). My hunch is that House Democrats proposed many of the changes (the risk pools were proposed by Pete Stark) and that the Democrats were able to get some of them but not others. Of course, Reagan and Senate Republicans accepted these changes as part of reconciliation bills-and may have initiated their own changes.

Regarding the point about who is responsible for using reconciliation to make substantive changes in the past, there is precedent from this era of both Republicans and Democrats signing off on changes to health policy using reconciliation. The difference in 2010 is that the Republicans won’t have as much leverage over the negotiations, since they control neither the Senate nor the White House. And the proposed changes are a lot more far reaching.

see Mann and Ornstein in TNR
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/truth-and-reconciliation

I agree that there has been far too little research on the use of reconciliation. A better understanding of reconciliation should be at the top of the research agenda for legislative scholars.

Another important thing to consider is that reconciliation does not always appear to be used to circumvent filibuster rules. Only nine out of twenty-two reconciliation measures that passed between 1980 and 2007 did so with fewer than 60 votes, and three of those nine did not become law because of successful vetoes. It’s possible that senators resort to it in certain circumstances for the convenience and efficiency gains that reconciliation has to offer.

I’m glad that the analysis at least mentions the fact that it’s a simple classification and isn’t really about the content of the legislation that was passed through reconciliation. The problem is, the content of the legislation passed through reconciliation is what’s really at issue. The Republicans noted this at the health care summit.

If there’s been a single bill passed though reconciliation that was supported by Republicans and affected a 1/6th, or even an 1/8th, of the ecnomy like this healthcare reform would, then Harry Reid might have a point. At this point, he doesn’t.

If you are going to include Carter then extend the range to 1977. Then verify
that he only used it once while in office. Going with that as an assumption.

Then weight the usage by years per party from 1977 - 2005.

Then don’t just count the approves/vetos, count the attempts that never got out of committee.

Then weight by years.

Rep: Signed/Attempts/Vetoed divided by 20 years in office.
Dem: Signed/Attempts/Vetoed divided by 12 years in office.

Otherwise your providing a misleading analysis.

Rep: 11 signed in 20 years= .55 per year
Dem: 5 signed in 12 years = .41 per year

So Republican Presidents use this about one-third more often than Democratic Presidents. Now when did Clinton Veto those three, was the Senate/Congress Republican at the time?

This assumes that Carter only used it once while in office.