RUSH: Mary in Lexington, Kentucky, welcome to the EIB Network. Great to have you here.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. It’s an honor to talk to you. My family and I love you and we’re raising seven Rush Babies, so anyway, I was wondering how you think Nancy Pelosi is going to be paving the way for reconciliation because I really don’t think you understand reconciliation very well.
RUSH: Well, it is misleading. There’s no such thing as reconciliation in the House. There’s reconciliation in the Senate. What Pelosi’s talking about is accepting the Senate bill. The problem with health care right now is there are two bills. Pelosi has one of her own, and the Senate has one. And the Senate, in order to get it passed, watered down a lot of the extremism in the House bill. They’ve taken a lot of stuff out that Pelosi and the liberals in the House wanted, but they want a bill. So what she’s saying is that they should use reconciliation in the Senate. Now, reconciliation is the one exception to requiring 60 votes to shut off debate and vote on a bill, and that’s called cloture. And the one exception is budgets, because the budget is constitutionally required so the Senate rules allow for reconciliation, meaning, we only need 51 votes to pass a budget in the Senate, as opposed to 60 on every other piece of legislation. So what she’s saying is the Senate should use reconciliation to pass the Senate bill and send that over to the House and that she would then sign it, or pass it on, and they would send that to Obama, and then he would sign it and that would send it all back and they’d start making changes in future amendments or other pieces of legislation. But it’s a trick because they don’t have the votes under normal procedures to get the bill out of the Senate. So she’s saying go ahead and use reconciliation, send that over here and we’ll rubber-stamp it, send it up to Obama and then we’ll start adding what we like later on after reconciliation has been used. Does that help you understand it?
CALLER: Yes, that does. Thank you so much.
RUSH: My pleasure. See, folks, this is what I mean. Become like me, the go-to person in your clique of friends when anybody has a question, you be the one that has the answer. Just make sure the answer is right. And the best way to become the go-to person is just listen to the show every day and go to my website, which is encyclopedic. I don’t plug it much because I get nervous plugging my own stuff. But it really is a great website, especially for members. So much there that its value is one of the best in the country, what can I say? Website people kind of get frustrated with me because I don’t plug it a lot. I feel a little nervous about it, but we’re very proud of it, it is a great website, and it has encyclopedic data. And by that I mean, archives, Essential Stack of Stuff, research opportunities and capabilities, transcriptions of so many of these programs and audio and video versions as well.