After passage of the Health care reform bill in the House last Saturday night, all eyes quickly turned to the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol. The Senate bill, a yet to be seen, is a combination of the HELP comm. and Finance comm. versions of Health Care reform. This bill, in conceptual language only, is presently being analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office. While Senate Leaders await the budget score from the CBO, staff behind the scenes are crafting a Health care bill that would qualify under the terms of the reconciliation process.

Meanwhile, the House bill has been received in the Senate and will be available for the Leader to make a debatable motion to proceed to the bill as early as Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2009. The Majority Leader has indicated he would like to move to proceed  to the House bill and conduct a procedural vote on that motion prior to the week long recess upcoming for the Thanksgiving Holiday. This procedural vote, known as a cloture vote, requires 60 votes to obtain. If 60 votes can be obtained, then the motion to proceed would then be under a time limit of 30 hours for debate. If the Leader fails to obtain the necessary 60 votes on the procedural question regarding proceeding to the Health Care bill, the other option available to the Senate Leader is the use of reconciliation. This process was teed up initially by having the mechanism included and adopted in the 1st Concurrent Budget resolution. The advantage of Reconciliation is its immunity from filibuster and the ability to  pass the bill with only a majority vote. The disadvantage is that bill opponents could use the "Byrd Rule" to strip out all "non-budgetary" policy provisions. In order to preserve this option, on October 15, the House Ways & Means Committee sent its Health reform bill to the House Budget Committee to meet the requirements needed in this process.

If the Senate fails to garner the needed 60 votes during next weeks procedural vote, watch and see if the Senate Finance comm. and HELP comm. swiftly send versions of the Health reform bill to the Senate Budget comm. This would be the last step needed to enable the Majority Leader to move the Health Care bill under reconciliation, thereby bypassing a motion to proceed and the 6+ additional procedural, cloture votes that would be required if the bill would be considered under the regular order. In addition to the numerous cloture votes needed at various stages to pass the Health care bill in the Senate, with each cloture vote, comes an unavoidable 1 intervening day that must pass between initiating the procedure and the actual vote itself.

The Reconciliation process saves time, valuable session days and only requires 50 votes to pass. The Majority Leader could lose 10 of his democratic members and still pass the bill with the Vice President voting to break the tie. In addition, sending the Senate bill into conference with the House is not subject to filibusters as it would be under the regular order. Also worth noting is that the conference report created by the conference comm. is not subject to a filibuster.To the contrary, the conference report is time limited to only 10 hours of debate.

While all eyes will be on the Senate floor in the next couple of weeks, the real place to watch is the Senate committees on Finance, HELP and Budget.

Finally, as a point of reference, the Senate has passed 23 reconciliation bills since its creation in the 70's. Some of these included welfare reform and the creation of SCHIP in the 90's and the Bush tax cuts in the early 2000's. The average vote in the Senate to pass these 23 bills is 67.25. Therefore, it can be concluded that Senate Leaders of the past used this reconciliation process to utilize the time restraints included in the reconciliation process and not necessarily the provision allowing the bills to be passed by only a majority vote. This present Majority leader might utilize the reconciliation process to pass Health Care reform for both procedural advantages.

Elizabeth Letchworth is the Owner-Founder of GradeGov.com, 4 times elected United States Senate Secretary for the Majority/Minority, U. S. Senate-retired, presently senior legislative advisor @ Covington & Burling, LLC