“That is fundamentally false,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) of Speaker Paul Ryan’s claims that the totality of Republican plans for health care reform – primarily via the “repeal and replace” refrain of President Donald Trump and the broader GOP – cannot be passed through the congressional process of “reconciliation.”
In an interview with CBS’s John Dickerson for Face The Nation, Cruz rejected the assertion that Senate rules prohibit the grouping together of Ryan’s “three-pronged” strategy for reforming health care regulation – in which health care reform is achieved via the American Health Care Act’s (AHCA’s) passage, executive and administrative policy reforms, and further legislation – into one bill.
Describing Ryan’s proposal as a “three -bucket solution,” Cruz said the third bucket amount to a “sucker’s bucket.”
Partial transcript below.
CRUZ: It’s their so-called three bucket solution, which is all the good stuff is in bucket three? Bucket three takes eight Democrats. Right now, Senate Democrats are opposing everything. You can’t get eight Senate Democrats to agree on saying good morning.
Anything in bucket three – I have called bucket three the sucker’s bucket. And what I have been urging the president and the administration and leader in both houses, take everything in bucket three, put it in bucket one. We have got to actually fix this problem.
DICKERSON: Their argument is that you can’t do it all in this, what you are calling bucket one, in the American Health Care Act that Paul Ryan and the president support because the rules of the Senate just will not allow it, and so that you’re — that is what you are up against here.
CRUZ: But that is fundamentally false.
The rules of the Senate, we’re on what is called budget reconciliation.
(CROSSTALK)
CRUZ: It is governed by the Budget Act of 1974.
It lays out a test for what is permissible on reconciliation, six-part test. The central part of the test is, it is budgetary in nature? If it is budgetary in nature, you can do it. If it’s not, you can’t.
You look at the insurance mandates, they impact billions of dollars of federal spending. And I will point out the Obama Justice Department went before the U.S. Supreme Court twice, and argued the mandates are integrally related, they’re intertwined with the subsidies, you cannot sever them.
Under the statute, we can do this now in bucket one. And if we don’t, this bill doesn’t pass. And if it doesn’t pass, it is a substantive and political disaster for everyone involved.
Senate rules for “reconciliation,” articulated in 1974’s Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, stipulate that budgetary bills can be passed with minimal debate (twenty hours maximum, overriding filibusters). Budgetary items subjectively deemed “extraneous matters” by the Senate parliamentarian, however, are subject to removal via a senator’s raising of a point of order challenging its budgetary germaneness.
Under the so-called “Byrd rule,” the Senate is prohibited from considering non-budgetary items (“extraneous matters”) as pat of a reconciliation bill. An item is deemed “extraneous” if it:
- does not produce a change in outlays or revenues;
- produces changes in outlays or revenue which are merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision;
- is outside the jurisdiction of the committee that submitted the title or provision for inclusion in the reconciliation measure;
- increases outlays or decreases revenue if the provision’s title, as a whole, fails to achieve the Senate reporting committee’s reconciliation instructions;
- increases net outlays or decreases revenues during a fiscal year after the years covered by the reconciliation bill unless the provision’s title, as a whole, remains budget neutral;
- contains recommendations regarding the social security trust funds.
Objections to the consideration of an “extraneous matter” via a senator’s raising of a point of order can be overcome with a three-fifths/sixty-vote Senate majority.
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