This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 10, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

Reconciliation was a process created to help Congress balance the books at the end of a year.

Now the process is being used to push through a health care reform that will

contribute to deficits. So says Michael Tanner, senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.

Well, last week, the President signaled his support

for the reconciliation process, kind of the nuclear option when it comes to

health care reform. Reconciliation is an obscure parliamentary tactic that's designed to circumvent filibusters.

You basically force a up or down vote that only requires 50 members of the Senate plus Vice President Joe

Biden in order to pass something. That way the Republicans can't use their usual

filibuster tactics in order to stop health care sort of negates the election of Scott Brown and Massachusetts.

However, this is not an easy process to do.

It's going to create a great many problems in both the House and

the Senate if they try to move forward with this.

Without an individual mandate, it gets very hard to do a lot of dictates about what goes into what plans and what kind of

coverage people are going to be provided. Well that's absolutely right and that's

part of what makes it so difficult to move the health care

reform under the reconciliation process. Reconciliation can really only be

used for budget items. It was created back in the 1970s to make it easier for Congress to balance its books at the end of the year.

The idea was that if you had budgeted $100 billion and you were coming in at $102 billion, you could go back and cut a couple of

billion out in order to make the books balance without having to go through all the

bigger moral of a filibuster. So it's really can't do policy changes. It's just budget changes. That means a lot of what they want to do in terms of health care reform can't go through the normal reconciliation process.

So reconciliation was in some sense a product of a time when people took deficits a lot more seriously than they do now.

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