Reconciliation
An expedited budget procedure that lets certain fiscal legislation pass the Senate by simple majority, without being subject to a filibuster.
Reconciliation begins with a budget resolution that instructs committees to report legislation changing spending, revenues, or the debt limit by a specified amount. The resulting bill gets privileged treatment in the Senate: debate is limited, so it cannot be filibustered, and it passes with a simple majority.
The trade-off is scope. Because the procedure exists to implement budget decisions, provisions that are not primarily fiscal can be struck under the Byrd rule. That constraint shapes what ends up in the bill as much as the vote count does.
A worked example
A budget resolution instructs the Finance Committee to report legislation reducing revenue by up to $1 trillion over ten years. The committee writes a tax bill within that limit; it goes to the floor under reconciliation rules with twenty hours of debate and no filibuster, and passes 51–50 with the Vice President breaking the tie. A provision in it that changed an unrelated regulation was struck beforehand under the Byrd rule, and its tax cuts sunset in year nine so that they do not add to the deficit outside the window.
Everything about the bill’s shape — the sunset, the narrowness, the amendments it could not carry — follows from the procedure that let it pass.
How to read it in coverage
“Passing it through reconciliation” means passing it with a simple Senate majority and accepting the constraints that come with that. It is a power tool for fiscal law, not a civic courtesy. A bill that does not change spending, revenue or the debt limit cannot use it. Expect a “vote-a-rama” — a marathon of amendment votes at the end of the limited debate — and expect provisions to disappear in the Byrd bath. The explainer lays the sequence out step by step.
Most major partisan tax and spending laws of the last three decades moved through reconciliation, because it is the route that does not require sixty votes.