Delaying the inevitable – GOP finds improper reconciliation language to force bill back to house

In a minor, and mostly symbolic victory, Republicans found a problem with the language of the House reconciliation bill that Senate Democrats have been trying to pass over the past 36 hours.

The Republicans found a provision that guaranteed Pell grants into the future without providing funding for them, leaving that to a future Congress.  As this provision does not reduce spending, it was not eligible to be in the reconciliation bill.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air touches on two points related to sending the bill back to the house:

If that’s all that gets struck from the bill, the only effect will be to lengthen the debate on health care.  Obviously, that’s exactly what the Republicans want.  With 62% of voters wanting the GOP to keep fighting against ObamaCare, their leadership has no reason to let up.

The big surprise here is that House leadership allowed themselves to screw up on minor points.  The process of reconciliation isn’t that arcane, and they certainly had the time to double-check their work.  They’ve been working on this strategy since Scott Brown won his election in mid-January.  To have the bill boomerang back because of Pell grants in a health-care bill is an embarrassment.

While this is mostly a delaying tactic by the Republicans, there is some significance to the delaying tactics.

First, a CBS poll released yesterday, which was conducted in the two days leading up to the House health bill vote, showed that 62% of American, including 41% of Democrats, wanted the GOP to continue to fight against Obamacare.  In addition, that survey showed 57%/18% that people believed that regardless of the Democrat’s claims of a great CBO score, that the bill would in fact increase the deficit.

Second, House and Senate Democrats had not only been working on the Reconciliation strategy since the Brown victory, but had spent weeks leading up to the vote working directly with Senate Parliamentarian Alan Frumin to insure that errors like this were not contained in the bill.  So, not only is it an embarrassment that these small errors existed, but also highlights the fact that the Democrats piggy backed a takeover of the student loan program onto Obamacare.

Finally, in addition to the minor victory of sending the bill back to the house for a new vote, and as a result keeping the ‘process’ in the news cycle, yesterday’s GOP tactics served another purpose.  The Republicans put forth close to three dozen amendments.  While they had no real hope that any would pass, many of the amendments were put forth, because voting against them will look bad for vulnerable Democratic Senators in November.  For instance, voting against an amendment that would forbid raiding Medicare to pay for the Obamacare bill.