 Good afternoon, Congressional Climate Campers. Welcome to a bonus fifth installment of EESI's Congressional Climate Camp. I'm Dan Berset, Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. EESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental energy and climate change topics to policymakers. We've also developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. As always, everything we do and produce, from briefings to fact sheets to podcasts, is freely available and accessible online. And also, as always, the best way to stay up to date and never miss a thing is to visit us online at www.eesi.org and sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Our original plan for Congressional Climate Camp was four sessions held on the last Friday of the first four months of the year. We started in January with process and specifically budget and appropriations. Then we delved into policy and examined the emissions profiles of major sectors of the U.S. economy in February. March was a little bit of a history lesson about past climate policy development efforts with some political science tossed in about the importance of bipartisanship and compromise to a healthy functional Congress capable of delivering equitable, inclusive climate policies. And a few weeks ago, we concluded with an overview of four areas that we think are especially ripe for emissions reductions and adaptation benefits. Building energy codes, mass timber, agriculture, and nature-based solutions for coastal resilience. If you missed any of our previous series, our full webcasts are archived online, again at www.eesi.org. And summary versions are available as episodes of our podcast, The Climate Conversation. For those congressional climate campers who have been with us for a few months now, you've heard us tease the session today. We knew almost from the start of the series that our original plan would need to evolve and include a focused discussion on the budget reconciliation process. Nobody knows for sure how the climate policy debate will play out in the coming months, but it is a safe bet that the buzz about budget reconciliation as a vehicle for climate policy and infrastructure in particular will get louder and louder, sort of like what our new cicada friends are capable of doing. And so that brings us to today. We are a week away from Memorial Day. The work period that starts after that long weekend and runs through July 4th will be pretty intense. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has already stated her intention for the House to vote on an infrastructure bill by then. So our goal with the help of our two experts who will join us in just a moment is for this session to be informative and helpful just in time to be an aide for staff who will be very, very busy very, very shortly. Thinking about today, I've tried to put myself in the shoes of that staff person on Capitol Hill. I worked for a member of Congress who serves on one of the authorizing committees. We have a bill that fits broadly in the working definition of infrastructure espoused by leadership. And my boss wants to know how our priorities fit in the package coming together and what needs to change to make that possible. Of course, this has been on everybody's mind for some time, at least as far back as the passage of the American Rescue Plan, which was also passed using budget reconciliation. But a lot of unknowns will start to be known pretty soon and momentum can build surprisingly quickly and no one wants to be unprepared for that. As a reminder, our session today, including summary notes will be posted online at www.esi.org and a condensed audio only version will be of each congressional climate camp, including today will be available as an episode of our bi-weekly podcast, The Climate Conversation. We have a lot to cover and you can participate in our discussion by asking questions. You can send us a message on Twitter at EESI online. You can send us an email EESI at EESI.org. Even if we get more questions and we can possibly answer, we'll do our best and follow up to answer every question submitted during congressional climate camp. So let's get down to it. Each of our panelists today will make short presentations and then we will kick off a discussion, a longer discussion than we've normally been doing during congressional climate camp. And now I get to welcome our first panelist. Molly Reynolds is a senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings. She studies Congress with an emphasis on how congressional rules and procedure affect domestic policy outcomes. She is the author of the book, Exceptions to the Rule, the Politics of Philbuster Limitations in the United States Senate, which explores the creation, use, and consequences of the budget reconciliation process and other procedures that prevent filibusters in the US Senate. Molly's current research projects include work on oversight in the House of Representatives, congressional reform, and the congressional budget process. She also supervises the maintenance of vital statistics on Congress, Brookings long-running resource on the first branch of government. Molly, welcome to the session today. I can't wait for your presentation. Thanks, Dan. It's really good to be here. It's really good to be here with Zach who you'll hear from in a little bit. But what I'm gonna do today is to try and provide a little bit of kind of big picture context for thinking about budget reconciliation historically and in the context of the contemporary legislative process. And so I have a couple of slides that I am going to share my screen so you can see. So hopefully everyone can see my slide that says four things to know about budget reconciliation that's where we're gonna start today. And so the first thing that I wanna sort of emphasize is that budget reconciliation as conceived of in the 1974 Budget Act looks really different than how budget reconciliation came to be used in the 1980s and the 1990s. So in 1974, when Congress passed the Congressional Budget Act, that act called for two budget resolutions every fiscal year. One early in the year before the appropriations process and then a second one by September 15th. It also provided for a reconciliation process that would happen alongside that second budget resolution. The idea was that Congress might not want to set binding ceilings and floors on how much it would tax and spend as part of that first budget resolution early in the year. Rather that first resolution, the drafters of the Budget Act imagine should be a target Congress should then make whatever fiscal decisions it was gonna make. And then it would write a second binding resolution just before the start of the fiscal year. But if existing laws weren't in line with those new binding levels in September, Congress might need to act quickly before the start of the fiscal year. And that's how we got the special expedited procedures that the Budget Act provides for reconciliation bills moving to the Senate. So we know that part of what makes the reconciliation process so powerful is the fact that reconciliation bills cannot be filibustered. And that it was this need to potentially act quite quickly that is why that those expedited procedures got put in the Budget Act in the first place. But it became clear pretty quickly that this idea of moving quickly for Congress was too quick that Congress couldn't possibly keep to this calendar. And to the extent that reconciliation was meant to also help committees reduce expenditures in their jurisdictions, it became clear pretty quickly that committees weren't actually that interested in doing that. And there was little reason for the Budget committees to try and force them to do so. So for fiscal year 1981, we saw the reconciliation process moved to be in connection to the first budget resolution. And then for fiscal year 1982 is when we get the first use of the process that looks more like what we think of today in terms of substantive legislative change. So then we have this period in sort of the 80s and the 90s, and this is my second bullet point here, that the way the process was used in the 80s and the 90s really also does not look that much like it's been used more recently. And in the 80s and 90s, we were generally seeing the process used for deficit reduction. And there was a degree when that was happening to which basically all of the committees were expected to share in some, share the pain of making cuts. And so the idea was that one of the ways that reconciliation was powerful in addition to the protection from the filibuster is that it would basically require committees to buy in to this shared goal of deficit reduction. And if you, I'm gonna go to the next slide here. I feel like here, these are some tables from the Congressional Research Service that run from 1989 through 2015. And you can see that in sort of the earlier period here, the 80s, the 90s that large numbers of committees were tended to be named in the reconciliation instructions. So the way the process was being used was again, this idea that we were gonna sort of, the Congress was gonna have this goal. They were gonna try and achieve deficit reduction, but they were gonna get lots of committees to share the pain in doing so. I wanna emphasize that even in this sort of model of using the reconciliation process, we have evidence, Dan mentioned my book and this is one of the things I look at in the book, but there's evidence that Congressional majorities were using the process to try and advance goals that were important to them as a majority party, even in this model of the reconciliation process. But again, it looks different than the way the process was used to say, to help pass the Affordable Care Act to achieve the Trump tax cuts, that sort of thing. It also means, because we have this model where lots of committees were involved in the process, that sometimes we got large bipartisan majorities for reconciliation bills. So I think today we think of reconciliation as this way to do things on a partisan basis, but this is a table that just tracks the final Senate vote margins on reconciliation bills from 1980 through 2017. And if you look, sort of again, in that 80s and 90s period, you see that some of these things did get large bipartisan majorities. Where we ended up in kind of the 2000s and the 2010s is moving to this model where reconciliation became more of kind of a one neat trick for achieving party defining priorities. So again, we're helping to pass the Affordable Care Act, Republicans failed attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, passing the Trump tax cuts. And then today, I would say we're, this year, we've kind of find ourselves back in the middle a little bit. We know from having looked at the American Rescue Plan that that was another instance where Congress kind of went back to this 80s and 90s model of enlisting lots of committees to do things as part of the process. But we're also, the process is seen as this way to accomplish things that in this case, Democrats really want to get done and that the filibuster might be preventing them from doing. So the third point that I wanna make is that because the process has become more important for congressional majorities to try and achieve their major policy goals, we've kind of stretched the boundaries of the process that we've ended up with, in many cases, less certainty about what is and is not allowed to be done through the reconciliation process. Zach is gonna talk, I think, a little bit more about this. And I'd encourage you, I think some of the resources that we shared for this session include discussion of kind of what topics have been covered by reconciliation bills in the past. They are wide-ranging. But the sort of contextual point that I wanna make here is that as the process has borne more policy priorities, we have ended up asking you more and more questions about how to fit things in the box. In addition, another consequence of asking the process to bear more policy change is sort of the more uncertain you are that something is reconcilable, the more likely you are to end up with a real policy problem in terms of how you construct a policy to get through the process rather than simply political problems. So I think that the minimum wage in the American Rescue Plan is actually a good example of this. So there were questions about whether that could be done through the reconciliation process. Ultimately, the answer was no, but so when that had to come out of the bill, it didn't sort of take the entire rest of the structure of the bill as a policy question down with it because it was a kind of discreet priority that was in an omnibus piece of legislation with lots of other things. As we, in other cases, when the process has been, or when folks have tried to use the process to accomplish specific policy goals, we do end up with more challenges in terms of the possibility that you might unravel an entire policy proposal. The last thing I'll say about sort of why the process I think has become more complicated is because of the expansion over time in the number of things that we use the tax code to try and accomplish. And so we know that revenue provisions are something that can generally be done through the reconciliation process. And this is just a graph from GAO that is meant to give you some sense of the degree to which tax expenditures, which are as that dotted line, have increased over time. And again, as the tax codes become a more important vehicle, I think for trying to achieve lots of policy aims, there's a little bit of a chicken and an egg question here. So how much of the reason we do things through the tax code is because you can do them through the reconciliation process versus how much does the reconciliation process bear more things, because we do things through the tax code. That's an interesting, not to unravel some time, but again, this is another reason, I think, another piece of context is important for understanding where we are right now. And then the last thing I'll say before I turn it over to, back to Dan, who will introduce Zach, is that it's also really important to remember that the rules are a big constraint here, but they're not the only constraint. One important thing to remember is that there are other features of the process that don't have to do with things like the bird rule that can limit how it's used. I think perhaps the most important one of these is time going through the reconciliation process, both in terms of writing a bill and then taking it through all of the hoops that are related to moving it on the floor is a really time consuming process. And if you are a majority that has other things you also want to use floor time for, you have to kind of make some choices about how to allocate that. It's also the case that I think one of the things that Zach might talk a little bit about is the sort of discretionary mandatory spending piece here. How do you make discretionary spending look mandatory? And there's some interesting lessons from the American Rescue Plan on that front. But it's also worth remembering that there are elements of the reconciliation process that can ask committees to give up some power that they have. This is part of the story from the early 80s in terms of the use of the reconciliation process for discretionary spending, part of sort of why that was a thing that was tried and that Congress did not keep doing is because the appropriations committees really did not like the authorizing committees infringing on their jurisdictions. And so just remember that, again, we're gonna talk a lot about the rules. We're gonna hear a lot about the rules as this moves as a subsequent reconciliation bill might move through the process, but the rules are not the only thing that limits or shapes how a reconciliation process might shake out. So I will stop there and I will stop sharing my screen and I will turn it back over to Dan. Molly, that was a great presentation. Lots to build on with Zach's presentation and our discussion. Before I introduce Zach, let me just make a quick reminder that slides and materials will be available online. And that includes some supplementary materials, both Molly and Zach have passed along some additional resources that we think would be helpful to congressional staff and folks in the stakeholder and advocacy communities too as they figure out how they navigate this. I will now introduce Zach. Zach Muller is the deputy director of the economic program at Thirdway, a think tank based here in Washington, DC. At Thirdway, Zach leads a team that specializes in developing innovative policy and regularly consults with policymakers and the media on the federal budget process and other issues of economic importance. Zach got his start in DC working on the Democratic Staff of the Senate Budget Committee under chairs Patty Murray and Kent Conrad. Zach earned a degree in economics from the University of Florida and also a master's degree in economics from the University of Virginia. Welcome to the panel today, Zach. I will turn it over to you. Great, thank you so much, Dan. And thank you to EESI for having me today and let me share my screen and get to my slides. All right. So basically my role here today is to kind of talk to you a little bit more about what's in and what's out of budget reconciliation. And to that extent, it's a lot about the rules. And when we're talking about the rules, frankly, it's all about the Senate. This is a very Senate-focused process. The rules are really where they're most binding in the Senate here. Just very quickly, reconciliation requires a budget resolution to start. So the instructions that are in the budget resolution that are given to authorizing committees must be followed. That means following the committees of jurisdiction. That means meeting a savings target or not going over a cost target that may be in the reconciliation instructions. And further, these rules are not only are they binding on the base tax, they're also gonna be binding when you're on the floor. Amendments to the bill itself must be germane. The amendments cannot increase the deficit unless you're moving to strike a provision. And they're still subject to all the other rules related to budget reconciliation including the bird rule. So just very briefly on the bird rule before I get in and out because this is the thing that I think most people talk about. The bird rule itself is a surgical point of order against extraneous matter. Now what the heck does that mean? Surgical, it is a surgical point of order. Surgical means only the offending material is removed. So this does not take down the whole bill necessarily. Point of order, a senator on the floor would raise a point of order against a provision in the text or would threaten to raise such a point of order and thus it might get worked out in advance. But the point of order has a super majority threshold which means the point of budget reconciliation by not getting to get around the filibuster becomes when you have to have a point of order that has that higher threshold. And extraneous matter is defined as it's six little tests. Most are objective, one is subjective and these kind of create the boundaries of a good chunk of what you can do. But at the end of the day it's really about spending and it's about spending in tax policy. It's about budgetary changes and that's gonna be just a key thing going forward. So what is clearly allowed under budget reconciliation? I classify what's clearly allowed in kind of in four categories, four broad categories. The first category is rates and dates. These are changes to marginal tax rates. These are changes to the date in which a policy may be expiring. So changing a rate could be moving the top marginal tax rate back up to 39.6%. It could be extending and expiring tax provision. It could be extending and expiring UI provision. These things are kind of clearly allowed. Tax policy is generally quite permissive and quite able to be allowed under budget reconciliation. But I stipulate that you shouldn't be too specific about your tax policy. So a climate example would be, a tax credit for electric vehicles would be allowed but something that might be too specific and might start running into rules changes would be a tax credit where only like Tesla vehicles qualify. I'll get into a little bit more about this in a little bit. Also things that are clearly allowed are expanding or trimming existing mandatory spending programs as long as it's not social security. So you could expand Medicare by lowering the eligibility age, you could find ways to save money in the Medicare program that those things are kind of clearly allowed. And then you're allowed to establish new direct spending programs. New spending, we saw a lot of that under the American Rescue Plan. These are things like new block grants, new mandatory spending, you could create a $10,000 training voucher, things like that. But there are limits on the process. We'll get into this more I think probably in the Q&A but a lot of people wanna put a lot of policy in a spending program. You can do this. You can't use the money for A, B and C. But the more and more limits that you put on spending, the more and more policy that you're putting into it, you create a situation where things may start to, you may start running into parliamentary problems. So let's talk about the things that are clearly not allowed. You cannot change social security with budget reconciliation. You cannot do things that do not produce a CBO score that do not score in reconciliation. So this means it's gotta be about spending and revenue. You can't add new points of order. You cannot really make changes to the civil or criminal code. Regulatory changes, saying a power plant, banning the use of coal power plants, for example, that would be a regulatory change and that would not be allowed under budget reconciliation. Provisions or policies that come from the wrong committee are not allowed. So if environment public works does not get a reconciliation instruction or the finance committee tries to do something that is in that committee's jurisdiction, you're going to run into problems and that will get stripped out. And then what's also clearly not allowed is long-term deficit increases without an on-committee offset. So this means a lot of policy has to be designed in a temporary basis, so that it does not increase the deficit in any year outside of the reconciliation bill. I say an on-committee offset because this provision is governed on a title-by-title basis. So essentially the finance committee cannot pay for another committee's priorities in the long-term in simple language there. But then there's everything in between. Look, there's a lot of different things that go on here and there's a lot of gray area. One of the bird rule tests is, it's called the merely incidental test, does the budgetary change that exists is that viewed as being merely incidental to the underlying policy? This is argued in front of the Senate Parliamentary. This is a picture of Elizabeth McDonough in the lower right-hand corner. And the parliamentarian is going to make a ruling or are going to make advisement based on established precedent. Those arguments are going to be done behind closed doors. We the general public may not even know what the result is of these arguments, except for if you look closely at the bill text and see things have changed or things have removed. But practically, look, what you are arguing is, can you say what you are doing, your policy change is about spending or revenue? And you have to tie it to that point at every juncture to be successful. There are a lot of edge cases and things that kind of inform things that tend to fall out because of this challenge. If you're targeting a single entity, that can be viewed as being merely incidental. This goes back to the example I gave earlier that a tax credit for electric vehicles might be okay, but a tax credit that only affects Teslas would be too specific as only one entity is benefited. Providing general waivers, exemptions, those have been viewed as things that tend to be merely incidental. And then changing a regulation on an industry will have some challenges. Of course, you can be creative in how you construct this. Changing a regulation may be out, but making a tax if an entity does something may be okay. So it's all about being creative to how you design a policy. Now, this might mean you're not designing your preferred policy, but you're designing it to fit under budget reconciliation. And just my last slide, there's just a few lessons from the American Rescue Plan that staff need to know about. I tend to look at budget reconciliation from one particular point of view and a very narrow point of view. And then we saw the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 come up. And a lot more things were allowed than I guess we had initially anticipated. So direct spending from an authorizing committee is more permitted than previously thought. A lot of the American Rescue Plan Act had a lot of direct spending, which means that for climate policy, for infrastructure policy, a lot could be allowed as long as the authorizing committee is the one that's spending the money. It's typically easier to fill up an existing pot of money that you know exists in law, that has restrictions on it than creating a new pot of money, a new program with restrictions. This goes into the fact that the more and more policy you pile on to a direct spending program, the further you get down a road where it's entirely possible that the parliamentarian is gonna ask you well, why is that one line? Why is this regulation important to the underlying spending? So you just have, it's easier to fill up a pot of money that's existing than create a new pot of money with restrictions. The American Rescue Plan had particular challenges with single target provisions, which is very relevant for infrastructure, which means I think it will be very difficult to get things that look like earmarks in infrastructure. Fix this road, fix this bridge. Those are gonna have huge challenges going forward. And then the last lesson that I would give to staff from the American Rescue Plan is making sure that the provisions, the bill texture working on has pretty clean jurisdictional boundaries. In the Senate, bills out in the normal process tend to get referred to by a preponderance of jurisdiction. So if you're doing something on tax policy, finance gets it. But it may be the case that, well, okay, there's probably a little bit of policy, if it's on the environment, there's maybe a little bit of policy that would normally live under EPWs jurisdiction. Well, when you're designing the policy here and because it's going through committee markups, the policy that overlaps multiple committees needs to live within the title of where the policy is actually meant to be. So you just have to be really, really careful. And thus, be very, very careful about where the jurisdictions of an individual committee may lie. So that is, those are my lessons there. And let me stop sharing my screen. Thanks Zach for a great presentation. We will now transition to Q&A and discussion. So I'll invite Ma, oh, there she is, turn your screen back on. We actually just got a question from the audience that I think it may be good just to pause to ask. Zach, on one of your slides, you had a photo of Elizabeth McDonough. She's the Senate parliamentarian. The question from the audience was where does the, what does the parliamentarian do? Who selects her and sort of what her role is. The parliamentarian serves at the pleasure of the Senate and she is generally responsible for providing advice and guidance on the rules of the Senate. She made some headlines in around the time the American Rescue Plan was coming together. She made a controversial ruling on the minimum wage. Zach or Molly, could you speak a little bit more about or just say a few words about sort of what role she functions, how the parliamentarian works with the majority and the minority right in the Senate right now? Yeah, so I'll start and then Zach can add. So I think he gave some important context in his presentation in terms of, in the context of reconciliation specifically, the parliamentarian is tasked with advising senators on whether a particular provision in a reconciliation bill does or does not comply with the bird role. This is a process that is affectionately referred to as the bird bath. Things that are removed as part of that process are affectionately referred to as bird droppings. I like puns, turns out the Senate does too. And so that's sort of a key responsibility that she has in this context. One thing I think is important to, since you mentioned Dan that the parliamentarian made some headlines in earlier in the year. I think we might talk about the parliamentarian the most sort of talking about reconciliation, but she has other functions in the context of the Senate and the fact that she has other functions including things like advising on which committees bills should be referred to. And on questions of committee jurisdiction there's value in having an entity that is seen as an honest broker by everyone in the legislative process that again extends beyond simply her role in the reconciliation process. So as kind of an institution within the institution I think that's important to remember that if she, like we might talk about her the most in this context but she has other jobs and that everyone in the Senate benefits from having someone who everyone sees as a neutral arbiter of a number of different issues. And I would just add, I think the media fascination with the Senate parliamentarian in my opinion is probably negative because at the end of the day it's political actors that are making a decision and they wanna blame, it's kind of like blaming the ref in sports or blaming the umpire specifically in baseball for someone that they're just doing their best job to call the balls and the strikes as they see them. This person has immense institutional knowledge and is a consummate professional. This isn't a person that is necessarily a political actor in their own right. So I think that's just an important thing to recognize. Thanks for that. And thanks for the question from the audience. Okay, so now we get to have the discussion and we're talking about this at a point like I said in my introduction the Congress is gonna debate infrastructure and it seems like that's gonna start happening pretty quickly and Zach, your presentation in particular sort of laid out sort of what's allowed what's not allowed and what's in the middle for someone who's thinking about how to approach reconciliation with the goal of getting their bosses priorities included in the mix. If they have something to start with that's written like a regular bill what are some of the differences between a normal bill and authorizing bill and what that has to look like to be successful in a reconciliation process. What are the types of things that might have to change? Is it just how it affects revenue how it affects spending or are there other sort of like are there other sort of construction elements that make an authorizing make authorizing texts different from reconciliation text? So let me just start here and say there are a lot of different things that make an authorizing bill and authorizing bill but I think what's key here is if your bill was already a tax policy bill and it was purely a tax policy bill you're already starting from a position where you're more likely to be able to make an argument that this can get into a budget reconciliation assuming that when you put this into the comprehensive package that the committee is putting together you don't make it be too expensive or anything like that. But if you're starting from something that's more regulatory or those sorts of things are authorizing a new program you need to make sure that it's not something that needs appropriations and the traditional appropriations process to come and backfill and provide your money. You need to make sure that there's direct spending provisions direct spending language within your bill to be fully reconciliation ready. I would suggest staffers who wanna do that make sure that they look at the American Rescue Plan and the legislative language that was used in that for a good chunk of the direct spending that was there. And then just realize you've written a bill and you've probably written a bill that you think is really great and you've done a lot of stuff in good faith to make sure that, okay, I realize that it's gonna touch four different old pieces of legislation. I've crossed my T's, I've dotted my I's. You have to recognize that you may start needing to make compromises and things that you want and you view as, oh, this was really important. This regulatory provision which prevents some gaming companies gaming the situation down the road. Well, you may run into situations where the parliamentarian is gonna say, well, is this necessary? Do you need this in there? Or you may be dealing with leadership or the committee and the committee may go, well, we just don't wanna run that risk. So, or it may conflict with other things. You recognize that you just, it may not be the exact same bill at the end of the day. So I'll add two things. So one picks up on sort of Zach's comments both here and his presentation about direct spending. And again, I will just emphasize that like, while one of the lessons from the American Rescue Plan is that we sort of saw more direct spending move to that bill than we might have otherwise thought that there may also be a limit on how much the appropriations committees are comfortable with authorizing committees, continuing to sort of take things that would have otherwise been programs that would be subject to annual appropriations and convert them into direct spending that is reconcilable. So I don't think we have a, as it's sort of like institutional political question, I'm not sure we have a great sense of that. The other thing I remind folks of is the implications of the 10-year window for reconciliation bills. So provisions that increase spending or cut taxes are, unless they're fully paid for beyond the reconciliation window, that's also a potential bird role violation. And so you might find yourself having to sort of do something over a different time horizon than you would otherwise. This is the Bush tax cuts, the parts of the Trump tax cuts. The reason they sunset is because of the 10-year window issue. So that's just another thing to keep in mind. Great, thanks. So we've talked a lot about American Rescue Plan and we're talking about sort of this in an infrastructure context. How many times can Congress actually use reconciliation? Is it something that's bound to a fiscal year? Is it bound to the lifespan of a budget resolution? Is it a calendar year? Is it a Congress? Molly, how frequently could Congress go back to this well if it chooses? And Zach, I'll definitely give you an opportunity to comment as well. So there are two pieces to answering this question, I think. There's a sort of what to the rules permit and then there's a what does the calendar as an actual thing that binds people permit. And on the what to the rules permit, under guidance from the parliamentarian that dates, I believe, to the early 2000s, the notion was that each time Congress did a budget resolution, that budget resolution could be followed by up to three reconciliation bills, one related to spending, one related to revenue and one related to the debt limit. But if you wrote a reconciliation bill that touched any one of those three areas, that sort of counted as your bite at the apple. And it's in practice pretty difficult if you wanted to sort of do anything. It can be quite difficult to do anything more than a straight like tax cut bill that doesn't touch revenue and spending. So we've seen relatively few years with actually more than one reconciliation bill attached to the same budget resolution. What happened a month or so ago is that the Senate Democrats saw an opinion from the parliamentarian on whether they could do a revision to the budget resolution for fiscal year 2021, which is the one that they adopted early this calendar year to create the reconciliation instructions for the American Rescue Plan. Could they go back and revise that budget resolution and would that permit them to do another reconciliation bill under the umbrella of the fiscal 2021 budget resolution? The Senate parliamentarian said, yes, I remain a little unsure exactly what the contours of what her yes means. So this brings me to sort of my second point before I turn over to Zach, which is that like the rules may say something about the number of times Congress could try to bite at this apple. But equally as important is the amount of time it takes to do a reconciliation bill and the sort of strategic questions about what do you wanna try and put in one versus split into two and if you split something into more than one and it takes you longer than you think to do the first one, do you ever really come back to the second one? And there's lots of, so those are questions that have to do with priorities and log rolling across issues and just the degree to which floor time, especially in the Senate and frankly, in this moment of lots of priorities for a new narrow majority that that's also, I think as binding a constraint on what we're talking about as the rules. Yeah, I agree with everything Molly said, especially this last point about political floor time. Everyone needs to realize that to do budget reconciliation you deal with the Senate Voterama process twice. For those of you that don't know or haven't lived it, Senate Voterama- Lucky for you, if you've never lived through a Senate Voterama. Lucky for you. Senate Voterama is a situation because there are time constraints built onto the budget resolution and budget reconciliation, that's what kind of gets around the filibuster at the end of the time, it's over. But at the end of the time, it's over means all the pending amendments and there are hundreds are up for a vote and you could just vote continuously. And so at that juncture, the entire Senate floor is kind of governed by unanimous consent and it's a unanimous consent agreement for when do all 100 senators get so tired of voting that they're calling it quits. And it's a really tough process, it's a tough process on staff, it's a tough process on the members and it eats up a lot of time. And so, and folks take a lot of difficult political votes, which is another constraint there. So that's part of why I thought at the beginning of, so after Democrats won the Georgia run-offs and it became a 50-50 Senate and Democrats held the House, the Senate and the White House as a result, I thought three attempts at reconciliation using the FY21 budget resolution, the FY22 budget resolution and the FY23 budget resolution would have been possible before the next election, before the November 2022 election. Whether or not the parliamentarian rules that you can revise the 21 resolution, I still think three is probably the most that this can bear over two years, but that's just my personal speculation, not a, this is technically what they could do. It's really interesting. Yeah, Voterama goes all night, it's a crazy environment. Yeah, and it's, I'll just say that like it, again to like go back to my opening comments that try to put this reconciliation moment in broader political context. In a Senate where there are far fewer opportunities for senators to get votes on amendments that they want generally, the Voterama becomes like an even more painful process because people look around and say, I have this amendment that I want to offer and I don't think there's any other time I'm going to get to do it. So I'm going to take the one chance that I have, but all your 99 colleagues are also thinking the same thing and that's part of what makes it as painful as it is. And I think it's gotten worse over time. Yeah. I think it's almost like, it's almost like a kid eating all their candy on Halloween night. It's, you've been like, I've been waiting for this, I've been waiting for this candy and then all at once, great. I have all these different options and you eat yourself sick. Is there another way to eat Halloween candy? I'm not aware. I guess not everyone just portions it out for a little bit at a time. I'm going to remember that this year when Colin brings all this Halloween candy home, I'll be like, no Voterama tonight, no Voterama. We'll parcel it out. And also like Molly, I think what you were saying is at ESI climate is, it's top of our list, but Congress has lots of other priorities, right? I mean, there's a very good reason why the American Rescue Plan came first because that was sort of the immediate. So I think that's a really important point for staff to remember as well, that Congress has lots of things on its plate, literally everything on its plate and it has to choose which priorities it prioritizes. I would like to just quickly remind everyone that if you have a question, there are two ways to ask it. You can follow us on Twitter at EESI online. You can also send us an email, EESI at EESI.org. Zach, we'll start with you on this one because you used to work there. The Budget Committee, what is the Budget Committee's role in all of this? What are their staff doing and are they available as a resource to other staff or what are they doing with all of this? I mean, they obviously have a huge role to play and I think maybe their importance generally is overshadowed sometimes by the Appropriations Committee at certain times of the year, some of the authorizing committees at certain times of the year. Yeah, so it's important to remember that budget reconciliation requires a budget resolution to get kicked off and the Budget Committees are the ones that write that budget resolution. That budget resolution contains the instructions that give the authorizing committees the ability to do that. So the political pressure on the committee to write a budget resolution that can meet what the majority wants dictates a lot of what can happen and an individual member's preferences on the Budget Committee can steer and change how it gets through committee. In 2017, there was a big debate for the budget resolution that set up the Trump tax cuts. There was a big debate inside the committee of whether or not they could get a majority based on a $1.5 trillion tax, $1.5 trillion instruction, net instruction. So who is on that committee can make a big difference. From a staff point of view, the Budget Committee contains a lot of the process experts on this. They contain the experts on where all the numbers need to be and where they may add up at the end of the day. So if you are a staffer, it's good to be in touch with your corresponding Budget Committee expert, whoever runs, if you're the environment staffer, it's important to be in touch with who is of your party and running the environment portfolio over at your committee because they're the ones that are gonna be knowing best about what's going on. And keeping those lines of communication open is something that I always recommend to congressional staff. The only thing that I'll add is this question was about the Budget Committee specifically, and Zach did a great job of sort of answering that, but the part where he was talking about the needing to get a budget resolution out of the Budget Committee. Also, because the majorities are so narrow in the House and the Senate, that's also gonna be a constraint on what that resolution might look like, especially if we're talking about a resolution that is also meant to actually set some top lines because I think that there's the potential for disagreement within the Democratic caucus from different wings of the party about sort of what things like the overall size of the defense budget should be. And that there is a potential, again, because we have fewer and fewer things that move through the legislative process, they all bear more of the political conflict. So the idea that there are things beyond just how does the budget resolution set up reconciliation that could get caught up in that debate, I think is also an important thing to remember. Yeah, just one thing on this because this is really important. The prior budget resolution that was used for the American Rescue Plan was the FY21 budget resolution. We were already halfway through, roughly halfway through fiscal year 2021 when that was utilized. If Democrats are gonna use the fiscal year 2022 budget resolution, that would be the first budget resolution after the expiration of the discretionary spending caps, which means it's a budget, it's a live budget resolution for determining the start of the appropriations process, which means it's just that more important. And we, our first congressional climate camp budget and appropriations and stimulus, we had a CRS analyst and a friend at the Bipartisan Policy Center come and talk to us about sort of the regular budget process, appropriations and sort of the role that the budget resolution plays and all of that. So, and there was a lot of discussion on spending caps actually during that. So if anyone in the audience was just intrigued by where Zach was going with that, we actually have a whole congressional climate camp on. And you should be, it's really important. It is really important. And so anyway, I would definitely encourage anyone to go back and read the, at least read the notes, but Kari and Frans did a great job presenting on those topics too back then. I'd like to sort of, we're getting close to our three o'clock stop time. And so I'd like to sort of ask a couple of last questions. This one is more about, you all have, the two of you have done a wonderful job explaining this and helping us understand sort of what this looks like and what the dynamics are. Are there quirks? There are lots of quirks with the process. But are there little things in the process or there are pieces of information that we haven't already covered that for a staff person sort of going into this process with their bosses' interests in mind trying to advance their priorities? Are there quirks of the process? Are there things that we haven't talked about yet that they should just know going in? And Molly maybe we'll start with you this time. Yeah, so I will say something that actually comes back to something that Zach said earlier and that has the potential to like interact with what feels like the possible, like pretty fast timeline here. So in your opening comments Dan, you were talking about what Pelosi has said about when the house is gonna vote on an infrastructure package. And one thing that is true particularly for things that are less clear fits in the reconciliation box is that sometimes you have to iterate over a policy idea on how exactly to get if you, so you try to take the policy kind of through the clear front door, that turns out to not fit in the reconciliation box. So you have to find a side door or maybe even a second side door or the back door. And so knowing that the, if you have a policy goal that the first idea you have may not be allowed into the process and that you might need to try and find a second way to do it. But while also knowing that the whole train is moving really quickly, I think is an important thing to remember. The issue of the individual mandate in the ACA repeal is a good example of how like first Republicans tried to go through the front door with a straight repeal of the mandate and the parliamentarian said that that was not permissible. And so they ended up going through a side door where they set the penalty for not having health insurance to zero. And so that's just an example again of how like the first thing they tried didn't work. So they tried something else. And so just kind of knowing that but also remembering that if the train is moving really quickly that like it's in your interest to try and get it right the first time but that is not unusual for it to be wrong. And then the other thing I'll say is just like this stuff is really complicated. I have one of my favorite things to show people in the context of talking about reconciliation is I have some documents that are from like the development of reconciliation bills in the 90s that are now at the National Archives. And one of them is a document prepared by the House Budget Committee where they were trying to speculate about what are possible what were gonna be possible violations of the birth rule and the bill went over to the Senate. And there are several of them where they just have these boxes with like this or provision next to the box. There's just like a series of question marks like I don't know. But again, these are people who do the who are experts and who do this as their job. And so just knowing that it's hard and it's complicated, I think it's also an important reminder. Then I'll just flag that staff need to realize that given the fact that this is essentially a democratic only exercise, it's gonna be a lot of what is in and what is out is governed in a political process held by leadership and held by the White House. And so as best as you're trying to represent your boss's interests, you have to recognize that you have to do that. You have to do that step to make sure that your leadership staff understand that your boss cares about this. And you have to do that kind of political legwork within the caucus to make sure that you understand, to make sure that leadership knows it's supported by not just New Dems but New Dems and progressives. And so that you can build that coalition to say, this should be in the bill. That being said, the more and more expensive your provision is because everything will kind of be locked in at the beginning in the budget resolutions instructions, the more expensive your provision is, the tougher it is gonna be to make that case. And what are you trading off? What are you taking out to put your provision in? And that will be on a committee by committee basis, that decision will be made. So talking with your authorizing committees, professional staff will be really important as well. Yeah, that's, we've talked about voter drama. Now it's time for cliche a polluza. Staff really need to understand that it's not just the ends, it's also the means, right? And that there's multiple ways to skin a cat. And also that you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And there are, you know, it's a, in some ways it feels a little bit like it's a problem in search of a solution. So those are all of the cliches, but those are my sort of extrapolations of some of your bits of advice from that. We're just about out of time, but I would love to give each of you an opportunity to plug your work, share some additional resources that you or your colleagues at Brookings or Third Way might have on the topic. And Zach, maybe we'll start with you. Other resources that you've either authored or that you think fondly of that you would like staff to be able to use as a resource. Great, so I wrote a paper recently this January about the role of the parliamentarian in this process and how we can use budget reconciliation to help the American workers recover. That should be posted as a resource available online. I know I sent that one over. And then I'll just also flag that the Center on Budget Policy Priorities and the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget both have very good entry level refreshers or short papers on budget reconciliation. I know even though like I pay attention to this more than the normal person, I still go back to them from time to time. I think that's, I think they're just really, really helpful and worth reading. I would second everything Zach said. I would say if you are, you're interested in getting like a deep dive into the history of reconciliation. There is some of that in my book, but you really don't need to read that. And the other thing I will say is that my other invaluable resource every time I need to is anything produced by the Congressional Research Service on Reconciliation. I have an entire file on my computer of CRS reports related to different parts of the process. I showed you one table polls from one of those reports on the number of committees named the instructions over time and just really those, the team over there who works on this stuff is really top notch. And so I would particularly for the Congressional audience I would say they are a great resource to reach out to as well. That is 100% endorsed that as well. Great advice, they're pretty amazing. And when I was talking about that first installment of Congressional Climate Camp we had a CRS analyst with us and she's the best. Great presenter too. We are just about out of time. I think this topic could be the subject of multiple briefings, but what I took away from the two of you, first of all, thank you so much for your expertise and your insight and your experience, your recommendations, your guidance. And I think it's for staff people it may not be possible right now to understand everything. But I think the two of you did a wonderful job helping to orient them, hopefully for navigating the process successfully. So I thank you so much for making time today for us and our audience. Thank you so much, Molly and Zach. I would like to just take a quick moment to share a preview of what we are planning on in June. We are gonna take a little bit of a break around Memorial Day but much like Congress, we're gonna come back in June in a big way. We are going to be looking at the energy system. We are going to be looking at proposals around the National Climate Bank. We have a really busy slate that we aren't quite ready to notice yet, but keep your eyes peeled because they will be coming out shortly. And if you really don't wanna miss it and you wanna RSVP as quickly as possible, the best way to do that as always is to visit us online at www.esi.org and to sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. We have a lot of great stuff coming up and I'm gonna hate for you to miss it. I will ask my colleague, Dan O'Brien, to put our slide up with our survey link. If you have the ability and two minutes to take our survey, we would really, really appreciate your feedback. We are always doing our best to improve our congressional education programming. I'm not sure how we could possibly have improved today's session with Molly and Zach, but maybe you had a tech issue, maybe my audio wasn't coming in. We really do read every comment that you submit. And so if you do have a moment, we would really appreciate your feedback. And it means a lot when you take time to do that. And just lastly, I would like to thank everyone at ESI who helped make today possible. I mentioned Dan O'Brien, big thanks to him. Thanks to Omri, Anna, Amber, Savannah, Sydney, and our interns, Jackson and Ashlyn for helping with today as well. They're two of our summer interns and they're already making a big impact on our on-bill financing work and our development work. So thanks to them. We will go ahead and end it there. Molly and Zach, once again, thank you so much. Thank you for our audience, for joining us today. If you liked what you saw, everything is available online. You can also go back and revisit the entire Congressional Climate Camp series. And I hope everyone has a great end of May, and a nice Memorial Day weekend. And we will see you all back here in June. And stay tuned. We'll be getting the briefing notices out as soon as we can. Thanks so much. Take care.