Member-only story
Democrats can pass the reconciliation today (sorta)
A bet on the ‘entitlement effect.’
This week, millions are playing Congressional Kremlinology, guessing whether House/Senate Dems have the votes for the $3.5T reconciliation package, playing Fantasy Football Sophie’s Choice to cut programs if corporate Dems whittle it down.
But as Harold Meyerson writes for The American Prospect, there’s a high-stakes, high-risk gambit that would let the willing, principled Democrats pass the whole package — simply cut the programs’ funding to four years, rather than a decade.
That reduces the package’s bill to a level that can be covered with agreed-upon “payfors” (these are the self-inflicted, nonsensical budget-balancing measures Dems insist upon, as though the US could run out of the dollars it creates by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet).
Passing this short-term version of reconciliation would give us four years of “affordable child care, universal pre-K, Medicare coverage of vision and hearing and dental care, paid sick leave, child tax…
