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ZombieCare

President Barack Obama is expected to reveal a new proposal for health care in the next few days, a way to revive the reform effort. The White House hints that the proposal might — gasp — include some Republican ideas.

The president has also invited Republicans to a health care brainstorming summit next week. It will be televised.

So does the president want a genuinely new approach to health care, or has he just decided that he needs a new political approach to sell an old package the public has come to distrust?

There's one way for Democrats to start restoring trust. They could formally swear off using the legislative trick called "reconciliation." Right now, they're clinging to it as a back-door way to shove their much-maligned health care plans through Congress.

The House and Senate have passed different versions of health care, but they don't much like each other's bills. The public doesn't like either of the bills. While Democratic leaders were haggling over what to do next, the whole effort flatlined when Republican Scott Brown won a special Senate election in Massachusetts.

So their bills are like zombies, floating in the netherworld. Not quite dead, clinging to life only because Democratic leaders keep whispering about this legislative maneuver called reconciliation.

It's a complex, lightly used budget-related gambit that "was never designed for this purpose," says Robert Dove, the Senate's parliamentarian emeritus who helped create the process.

Democrats no longer have 60 votes in the Senate to avoid a Republican filibuster. But reconciliation could allow them to do just that.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been talking up the prospect of using this legislative sleight-of-hand. Pelosi told Roll Call that the Democrats have to convince Americans that there's nothing "extraordinary" about it. "It would be a reflection on us if we could not convince people that this is not an unusual place to go," she said.

The tactic could be used in different ways. The House could approve the Senate's version of health care reform. Then both chambers could immediately pass a second bill — using the reconciliation process to expedite it — that would include changes the House demands in the Senate bill.

There's a problem: Trust. House Democrats don't trust Republicans, of course. But they also don't trust their colleagues in the Senate to pass the changes. So House and Senate Democrats are locked in a procedural scrum, trying to figure out how all of this might work.

There's talk about approving the changes first, then having the House vote on the Senate health care bill. But then they'd be changing a law that didn't yet exist. Hmmmm. Problem. Another zombie.

Yes, it is convoluted. Confusing. And unnecessary.

More . . .

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