“2. Democrats are threatening to use reconciliation to pass health-care reform.

…So Obama doesn’t need to resort to reconciliation to pass health-care reform. He’s already passed it. What he does need it for, however, is passing the revisions necessary to get the House and the Senate to agree on a single version of the legislation. This means that after the House passes the Senate version of the bill, the Senate will approve what’s known as a “sidecar”—a small package of budget-related tweaks designed to make the House happy. These revisions represent the only part of health-care reform that Senate Democrats are seeking to pass through reconciliation, i.e., with a simple majority rather than a supermajority. This is less ambitious than the usual reconciliation process, which typically applies to entire bills, not more.