Agenda at Tipping Point
By Ryan Lizza
7:27 P.M.
... The G.O.P. has adopted a major .. agenda: transforming a massive sector of the economy, slashing taxes and rewriting the entire tax code, passing a budget that would dramatically reduce the size of government, and, in the middle of all of that, raising the debt limit. They have a plan to accomplish almost all of it before the end of the year, with minimal transparency, and without relying on a single Democratic vote. But ...
... Republicans can’t move on with the rest of their wish list until they pass the health-care bill. And those prospects are not looking good ...
The parliamentary maneuver McConnell is using is called reconciliation. The process was created, in 1974, as a way to streamline the congressional budgeting process. It wasn’t intended to be used for major legislative changes. However, as partisan deadlock has grown, it has become an increasingly attractive legislative tool because it is protected from a filibuster in the Senate and therefore needs only fifty, rather than sixty, votes to pass ...
This year, Republicans ... planned to use one reconciliation bill for health care and a separate one for the beast of tax reform. But one of the many arcane rules about the reconciliation process is that any new reconciliation bill cancels out the old one ...
If the Senate health-care bill dies and Republicans move on to tax reform, they will have an interesting choice to make: do they give up on health care and propose only a tax-reform bill? Or do they combine tax reform and health care into one monster bill ...
http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/the-entire-trump-agenda-is-at-a-tipping-point
= new reply since forum marked as read
Well worth an R&
