What does budget reconciliation have to do with COVID-19 relief?

For a status update on COVID19 relief efforts, it helps to have a quick refresher on federal budgetary processes.

In a recent Twitter thread, Kelly Whitener, associate professor of the practice at the McCourt School’s Center for Children and Families (CCF), explains budget reconciliation and how it connects to COVID19 relief.

For further reading on the budget reconciliation process and the history of past uses, you can read more on the CCF blog.

Are stimulus checks on the way? What does budget reconciliation have to do with #COVID19 relief? What is a vote-a-rama?

Federal budgetary processes are usually followed by the wonkiest policy wonks, so @GeorgetownCCF’s Kelly Whitener put together resources to help explain.

Stimulus checks aren’t in the mail … yet. But the steps taken this week mean that a #COVID19 relief bill could move forward with just a simple majority vote in the Senate, rather than the usual 60-vote threshold.

The House always operates on a majority rule, but in the Senate, most legislation requires 60 votes to end debate. This can get tricky, any Senator can block or delay on legislation by filibustering (read: debating at length or even reading bedtime stories).

This process opens up a risk: if Senate Democrats and Republicans didn’t reach an agreement, a filibuster could prevent the passing of COVID19 relief.

Enter budget resolution and reconciliation. The rules for the budget are different. Debate time is limited and only 51 votes are required. The last step on the budget resolution in the Senate is a series of rapid-fire amendments, known as vote-a-rama (which happened last night and early this morning).

VP Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to end the vote-a-rama, leading to Senate passage of a budget resolution. The House passed its budget resolution earlier this week, but expected to pass the Senate version soon.

So, then will stimulus checks be on the way? No, not yet. Next, the budget reconciliation process begins. Various House and Senate committees will draft policies to meet the reconciliation instructions laid out in the budget resolution. The instructions have been carefully crafted to include POTUS’s American Rescue Plan.

Like the budget resolution, the reconciliation bill gets special treatment in the Senate (limited debate, no filibuster, simply majority vote to move forward). It makes it easier to pass legislation, but there are other rules that can make it harder, like the Byrd rule.

The Byrd rule requires every provision in a reconciliation bill to impact the budget, and the budgetary impact can’t be merely incidental to the policy change. Stimulus checks would pass as long as they’re temporary. Less clear is whether increasing the minimum wage would.

Once a reconciliation bill comes together, it has to go through all the usual steps for how a bill becomes a law — the same language must be passed by both chambers and the President must sign it.

That’s when you could see stimulus checks start to go out.

Jumping through these process hoops to get to a place where majority rules in the Senate raises important questions. Why does the Senate typically require 3/5 vote to move legislation? What role does the filibuster serve? Would the Senate be better or worse off without it?

Dive deeper by reading the Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families blog on Past Uses of Budget Reconciliation and the Washington Post’s recap on vote-a-rama.