It's time to reform reconciliation

Larry Kudlow's opening riff yesterday is a perfect example for why reconciliation needs to be overhauled. In his opening riff, Kudlow states "This new spending number that is circulating at $1.75 trillion is phony boloney. It’s larded with gimmicks and not credible. The Wall Street Journal's editorial today called it a 'jerry-rigged budget framework.' They are right. Basically, the Democrats are scoring permanent programs as one-year temporaries. Like extending the child-care tax credit for a one-year cost of $110 billion, when in fact it’s a 10-year cost of well over $1 trillion. Ditto for expanding Obamacare subsidies. And expanded Medicare and Medicaid services. The Journal puts the cost at $4 trillion."

Nobody thinks that Democrats want the child-care tax credit to sunset after just a year. That isn't transformational. That's a lie. The reforms I'm thinking of would give Democrats 2 options in this situation.

The first option is to tell them that they'd have to use regular order and get the 60 votes to stop a filibuster if they wrote a bill with such gimmicks. The other option would require political parties to disclose, in this instance, the cost of 10 years of tax hikes and 10 years of the child-care tax credit to qualify for reconciliation.

If Democrats want to use reconciliation, they should be required to talk about the true cost of the bill that they're using reconciliation to pass. If Democrats want to play games with the numbers, they can fight the filibuster.

Reconciliation wasn't implemented to help pass transformational legislation with a simple majority. It was implemented to pass budget-related items. This isn't Mr. Kudlow's Friday riff but it's on the same topic and well worth watching: