Yesterday, “CNN reported”:http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/02/23/dems.health.care/index.html?hpt=T2 Senator Harry Reid as saying that Republicans “should stop crying about reconciliation as if it’s never been done before. It’s done almost every Congress, and they’re the ones that used it more than anyone else.”
I decided to try to track down some numbers to see if I could verify Reid’s contention. I want to begin with the major caveat that I am not a scholar of legislative politics, so I am in part engaging in this exercise to see if readers of the Monkey Cage can help build on my modest efforts to classify past efforts at reconcilliation by party. I want to also note that I first went to Google Scholar to see if I could find any academic articles on the topic, and was unable to do so; if you have one, please write in and include a link in the comments section.
So what I was able to find a report from the nonpartisan “Congressional Research Service”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Research_Service on “The Budget Reconciliation Process”:http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL33030_20050810.pdf. This report includes an appendix table which lists House and Senate action on Reconciliation Acts from FY1981- FY2005. There are a total of 19 bills reported on in the table. Reid, in his comments yesterday, referred to “21 bills”:http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/02/23/dems.health.care/index.html?hpt=T2. So while I’m obviously missing at least 2 of the bills that he was referring to, I’m also taking that as a sign that CRS report substantially overlaps which whatever collection of bills Reid was talking about; it’s completely possible that he was referring to the 19 bills in the CRS report plus two others that took place after FY2005.
Since I have no expertise on the content of these bills, my classification is very simple and involves two factors: (1) whether a Democrat or Republican was president at the time the bill was passed and (2) whether the bill was vetoed by the president. My assumption here is that if a Democratic president signs a reconciliation bill, then the reconciliation process was likely used by Democrats. If a Democratic president vetoes a reconciliation bill, then I’m assuming the process was likely used by Republicans. And visa versa. So here’s what we’ve got in the CRS report:
* 11 reconciliation bills were signed by Republican presidents (Reagan: 7; Bush (41): 2; Bush (43): 2)
* 5 reconciliation bills were signed by Democratic presidents (Carter: 1; Clinton: 4)
* 3 reconciliation bills were vetoed by Democratic presidents (Clinton: 3).
* 0 reconciliation bills vetoed by Republican presidents
Thus by my admittedly _simple_ classification scheme, this would suggest that 14 of the 19 times reconciliation was used between FY1981 – FY2005, it was used to advance Republican interests. Or, to put this more precisely, it was used to advance bills that were signed by Republican presidents or vetoed by Democratic presidents.
I welcome any comments from people who know about the content of these bills to offer suggestions to improve these classifications! To kick off this discussion, my system codes the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (aka Welfare Reform) as a use of reconciliation to advance the interests of Democrats, because it was signed by a Democratic president. I’m guessing a good case could be made that this was more of a Republican bill than a Democratic bill. If so, that would only add to the already large proportion of times that reconciliation has been used to advance Republican interests. But it is certainly possible that their was an analogous bill(s) under Republican presidents that I’m missing here, so for now I’ll leave the numbers as is.