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“Reconciliation,” the process that gives measures like health care an up-or-down majority vote in the Senate, has been used repeatedly, by both parties, for decades. “The way in which virtually all of health reform … has happened over the past 30 years has been the reconciliation process,” says Sara Rosenbaum, chair of the Department of Health Policy at George Washington University. Republicans even used reconciliation to pass trillions of dollars of debt-financed tax cuts under President Bush. They weren’t calling it a “parliamentary trick” then. Of the 22 times reconciliation has been used over the past 30 years, Republicans have used it 16 times; that’s 72 percent of the time.