Reconciliation (United States Congress) facts for kids
Budget reconciliation is a special parliamentary procedure of the United States Congress set up to expedite the passage of certain federal budget legislation in the Senate. The procedure overrides the Senate's filibuster rules, which may otherwise require a 60-vote supermajority for passage. Bills described as reconciliation bills can pass the Senate by a simple majority of 51 votes or 50 votes plus the vice president's as the tie-breaker. The reconciliation procedure also applies to the House of Representatives, but it has minor significance there, as the rules of the House of Representatives do not have a de facto supermajority requirement. Because of greater polarization, gridlock, and filibustering in the Senate in recent years, budget reconciliation has come to play an important role in how the United States Congress legislates.
Budget reconciliation bills can deal with spending, revenue, and the federal debt limit, and the Senate can pass one bill per year affecting each subject. Congress can thus pass a maximum of three reconciliation bills per year, though in practice it has often passed a single reconciliation bill affecting both spending and revenue. Policy changes that are extraneous to the budget are limited by the "Byrd Rule", which also prohibits reconciliation bills from increasing the federal deficit after a ten-year period or making changes to Social Security.
In April 2021, the Senate Parliamentarian—an in-house rules expert—determined that the Senate can pass two budget reconciliation bills in 2021: one focused on fiscal year 2021 and one focused on fiscal year 2022. In addition, the Senate can pass additional budget reconciliation bills by describing them as a revised budget resolution that contains budget reconciliation instructions. However, the Parliamentarian later clarified that the “auto-discharge” rule that allows a budget resolution to bypass a Budget Committee vote and be brought directly to the Senate floor does not apply to a revised budget resolution. As a result of this ruling, a revised budget resolution would need to be approved by a majority vote of the Budget Committee before proceeding to the Senate floor, or deadlocked with a tied vote and then brought to the Senate floor via a motion to discharge. In a 50-50 Senate where committees are evenly divided between parties, this has the functional effect of requiring at least one member of the minority party on the Budget Committee to be present in order to provide a quorum for a vote. Considering the partisan nature of reconciliation legislation, it is highly unlikely that a member of the minority party will cooperate with the majority by providing a quorum on the Committee, thus practically limiting the majority of a 50-50 tied Senate to one reconciliation bill per fiscal year.
The reconciliation process was created by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and was first used in 1980. Bills passed using the reconciliation process include the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
Process
Reconciliation process
Reconciliation is an optional part of the annual congressional budgetary process. Typically, the reconciliation process begins when the president submits a budget to Congress early in the calendar year. In response, each chamber of Congress begins a parallel budget process, starting in the Senate Budget Committee and the House Budget Committee. Each budget committee proposes a budget resolution setting spending targets for the upcoming fiscal year; in order to begin the reconciliation process, each house of Congress must pass identical budget resolutions that contain reconciliation instructions. Other committees then approve bills that meet the spending targets proposed by their respective budget committees, and these individual bills are consolidated into a single omnibus bill. Each house of Congress then begins consideration of their respective omnibus bills under their respective rules of debate.
The reconciliation process has a relatively minor impact in the House of Representatives, but it has important implications in the Senate. In contrast to most other legislation, senators cannot use the filibuster to indefinitely prevent consideration of a reconciliation bill, because Senate debate over reconciliation bills is limited to twenty hours. Thus, reconciliation bills only require the support of a simple majority of the Senate for passage, rather than the 60-vote supermajority required to invoke cloture and defeat a filibuster. Senators could theoretically prevent passage of a reconciliation bill by offering an unending series of amendments in a process colloquially known as a "vote-a-rama", but, unlike the modern filibuster, senators introducing these amendments must stand up and verbally offer the amendments.
Though the reconciliation process allows a bill to bypass the filibuster in the Senate, it does not affect other basic requirements for the passage of a bill, which are laid out in the Constitution's Presentment Clause. The House and Senate still must pass an identical bill and present that bill to the president. The president can sign the bill into law or veto it, and Congress can override the president's veto with a two-thirds majority vote in both houses of Congress.
Byrd Rule
The Byrd Rule, named for Senator Robert Byrd, was adopted in 1985 and amended in 1990. The Byrd Rule defines a provision to be "extraneous"—and therefore ineligible for reconciliation—in six cases:
- if it does not produce a change in outlays or revenues;
- if it produces an outlay increase or revenue decrease when the instructed committee is not in compliance with its instructions;
- if it is outside the jurisdiction of the committee that submitted the title or provision for inclusion in the reconciliation measure;
- if it produces a change in outlays or revenues which is merely incidental to the nonbudgetary components of the provision;
- if it would increase the deficit for a fiscal year beyond those covered by the reconciliation measure (usually a period of 10 years); or
- if it recommends changes in Social Security.
The Byrd Rule does not prevent the inclusion of extraneous provisions, but relies on objecting senators to remove provisions by raising procedural objections. Any senator may raise a procedural objection to a provision believed to be extraneous, which will then be ruled on by the presiding officer, customarily on the advice of the Senate parliamentarian: a vote of 60 senators is required to overturn their ruling. While the vice president (as president of the Senate) can overrule the parliamentarian, this has not been done since 1975.
In 2001, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott fired Parliamentarian Robert Dove after bipartisan dissatisfaction with his rulings, and replaced him with the previous Democratic appointee, Alan Frumin.
Other restrictions
Congress can pass up to three reconciliation bills per year, with each bill addressing the major topics of reconciliation: revenue, spending, and the federal debt limit. However, if Congress passes a reconciliation bill affecting more than one of those topics, it cannot pass another reconciliation bill later in the year affecting one of the topics addressed by the previous reconciliation bill. In practice, reconciliation bills have usually been passed once per year at most.
Other restrictions have also been applied to reconciliation. For example, from 2007 to 2011, Congress adopted a rule preventing reconciliation from being used to increase deficits.
See also
- Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974
- Filibuster in the United States
- Nuclear option
