Below The Beltway

After yesterday’s report that Democrats were considering a “go it alone” strategy on health care, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that they are considering dividing the reform package up into two or more bills:

The White House and Senate Democratic leaders, seeing little chance of bipartisan support for their health-care overhaul, are considering a strategy shift that would break the legislation into two parts and pass the most expensive provisions solely with Democratic votes.

The idea is the latest effort by Democrats to escape the morass caused by delays in Congress, as well as voter discontent crystallized in angry town-hall meetings. Polls suggest the overhaul plans are losing public support, giving Republicans less incentive to go along.

Democrats hope a split-the-bill plan would speed up a vote and help President Barack Obama meet his goal of getting a final measure by year’s end.

The main reason they’re considering this appears to be the idea that they can get some parts of the package passed more easily if they aren’t part of a larger bill:

Most legislation in the Senate requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, but certain budget-related measures can pass with 51 votes through a parliamentary maneuver called reconciliation.

In recent days, Democratic leaders have concluded they can pack more of their health overhaul plans under this procedure, congressional aides said. They might even be able to include a public insurance plan to compete with private insurers, a key demand of the party’s liberal wing, but that remains uncertain.

Other parts of the Democratic plan would be put to a separate vote in the Senate, including most of the insurance regulations that have been central to Mr. Obama’s health-care message.

That bill would likely set new rules for insurers, such as requiring they accept anyone, regardless of pre-existing medical conditions. This portion of the health-care overhaul has already drawn some Republican support and wouldn’t involve new spending, leading Democratic leaders to believe they could clear the 60-vote hurdle.

Ezra Klein, who has been skeptical of the whole idea of using reconciliation to pass health care reform in the past, doesn’t think the strategy has much merit:

This strategy has always puzzled me a bit. Reconciliation is the most controversial move you can make in health-care reform, as it cuts the minority’s power entirely. If you go that route for most of the bill, it seems unlikely that a couple of Republicans will lend you their votes to finish the job. But if they would, or if you can get 60 Democrats to hold strong and break the filibuster, then why couldn’t you get that in the first place, bypassing reconciliation altogether? To put it simply, if you have the votes for this strategy, you don’t need to pursue it, and if you don’t have the votes for it, then you’re stuck anyway.

James Joyner, meanwhile, points out the contradictory nature of the plan:

If the Democrats have the votes to pass the more controversial parts of the bill on their own, why would they take the heat for doing it and then give the Republicans a free pass by allowing them to vote for a pain-free bipartisan bill?

Part of it, I think lies in the fact that there’s really no guarantee that reconciliation will work at all:

The problem with breaking the rules — or, more to the point, using them in unintended ways — is that anyone can do it. Remember when minority Democrats were threatening to “shut down the Senate” when Bill Frist eliminated the filibuster for judicial nominees? It wasn’t an idle threat. They could well have shut down the Senate. Nearly all Senate business requires unanimous consent to proceed. Republicans are no less aware of this fact than Democrats were. If Democrats try to invoke reconciliation and then override the parliamentarian and rewrite the Senate rulebook on the fly, the GOP will quickly and easily close down the chamber.

At that point, you’re in a standoff: The government shuts down. Everyone takes to the airwaves. And you wait to see which party breaks — or gets broken by public anger — first. In essence, you’re exactly where you would’ve been if you had just broken out the cots and decided to fight out an endless filibuster, but you face the added impediment that the media is kicking the hell out of you for cheating, and Republicans can argue — accurately — that you just attempted a thuggish takeover of the Senate.

As a general rule, if there were a foolproof way around the 60-vote threshold, the senators of one party or the other would have thought of it, and at least a couple of radicals would have loudly advocated for it

More likely then not then, as Marc Ambinder notes, the threat of reconciliation, whether for the bill as a whole or some portion of it as the Journal describes, is just that, a threat made in the hope that the other side will back down from any threat of a filibuster. In the end, the costs that the Democrats would incur in trying to ram any kind of major change to the health care system via reconciliation would be far greater than the benefits, which is why I doubt they’ll actually do it.