Brought to you by the Federalism & Separation of Powers Practice Group
There is a lot of discussion right now about the use of "reconciliation," a mechanism for enacting legislation to carry out the budget resolution that cannot be filibustered in the Senate, to enable enactment of health care legislation. As part of our New Federal Initiatives Project, we asked Martin Gold, a partner at Covington & Burling and one of the country's leading experts on congressional procedures, for a paper discussing the issues that this raises. The views set out in this paper are his own, not those of the Federalist Society. For a competing take on these issues, see “Reconciliation for Health Care Should Not Be an Issue” by Stanley Collener, a contributing writer for Roll Call who for most of his career worked on budgetary issues.
