In His 7 Years In The Senate, Lamar Alexander Voted For Reconciliation Bills At Least 4 Times

During today’s bipartisan health care summit, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) — who continues to argue that Congress is not able to pass comprehensive legislation — cautioned Democrats against using reconciliation to pass health care reform. “You can say that this process has been used before and that would be right, but it has never been used for anything like this,” he claimed:

ALEXANDER: Before we go further today that the Democratic Congressional leaders and you Mr. President renounce this idea of going back to the Congress and jamming through…a little used process we call reconciliation your version of the bill…Senator Byrd who is the constitutional authority of the Senate said it would be an outrage to run the health care bill th rough the Senate like a freight train iwth this process.

Watch it:

Since the House and Senate first used the budget reconciliation process in 1980, they passed at least 19 reconciliation bills that “have been enacted into law,” including major health care reform initiatives. Reconciliation legislation enacted in 1997 created the Children’s Health Insurance Program,” the Medicare Advantage program in 1997 (then called “Medicare+Choice”), and COBRA. In 2001 and 2003, Republicans broke the tradition of using reconciliation to lower the deficit and used the process to “enact a large tax cut that greatly increased federal deficits and debt.” In fact, political scientist Joshua Tucker’s analysis of reconciliation utilization found 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.”

Alexander, a former Governor and Secretary of Education, was elected to the Senate in 2003 and has personally voted for reconciliation at least four different times:

- 2003 Bush Tax Cuts: The Congressional Budget office, Bush’s tax cuts for the rich increased budget deficits by $60 billion in 2003 and by $340 billion by 2008. The bill had a cost of about a trillion dollars. [Alexander voted yes.]

- 2005 Deficit Reduction Act of 2005: The bill cut approximately $4.8 billion over five years and $26.1 billion over the next ten years from Medicaid spending. [Alexander voted yes.]

- 2005 Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005: The bill extended tax cuts on capital gains and dividends and the alternative minimum tax. [Alexander voted yes.]

- 2007 College Cost Reduction and Access Act: The bill forgave all remaining student loan debt after 10 years of public service. [Alexander voted yes]

It’s also unclear that Byrd opposes using reconciliation to pass some parts of health care reform. Today’s New York Times, quotes a Byrd spokesperson as saying, “Mr. Byrd is not [opposed to using reconciliation] ‘if it’s done right.‘”