Aug. 12 (Bloomberg) -- The central figure in Congress’s struggle to craft health-care legislation may be someone who’s neither a Democratic nor Republican lawmaker, or an elected official of any kind. He’s Alan Frumin, Senate parliamentarian.

It’s a role the obscure official could assume if the Senate fails to reach a bipartisan deal on a health-care bill. Democratic leaders and President Barack Obama say they would prefer such an accord. If they can’t get it, they have signaled they will turn to the so-called reconciliation procedure to short-circuit Republican opposition.

That move would enable Senate Democrats to pass a bill with 51 votes, rather than the 60 typically needed for contentious legislation. Under Senate rules, it also would give Frumin, 62, broad authority to decide which portions of the Democrats’ bill are relevant to the budget and empower him to delete provisions he considers unrelated.

“You’d end up with the parliamentarian of the United States Senate writing a health-care bill,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican.

Provisions of a health-care plan Frumin may remove, lawmakers say, include a proposal barring insurers from denying coverage, the creation of a government-run insurance program and efforts to encourage preventive medicine.

Used by Both Parties

Reconciliation has been used 22 times, by both parties, since it was created in 1974. Republicans relied on it in 1981 to cut spending programs such as welfare and food stamps. President George W. Bush employed the procedure to approve his tax cuts. In the mid-1990s, President Bill Clinton revamped welfare policies with it. In 2007, Senate Democrats invoked it to pass a measure cutting subsidies to student-loan providers.

Talk of reconciliation in the health-care battle intensified as the Senate headed into its August recess without an agreement on a bill. Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, said last week that if the Finance Committee’s Republicans and Democrats couldn’t strike a deal by Sept. 15, his party may go it alone through reconciliation. Obama also raised that prospect.

The reconciliation process was devised to make it easier to trim the federal deficit by removing the 60-vote requirement that proved a barrier to passing tax increases or spending cuts. Senate rules bar lawmakers from using it to pass measures tangential to the budget.

Appointed in 2001

Frumin declined to comment. A graduate of Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, and Georgetown University’s law school in Washington, he’s worked in the parliamentarian’s office since 1977. He was appointed to the top job in 2001 after his predecessor, Bob Dove, was fired by then-Majority Leader Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican. Frumin became the first parliamentarian named by both parties. The job pays about $167,000 a year.

A senator may demand that a bill’s provision be deleted if it has only an “incidental” budgetary impact. Deciding what counts as incidental is the parliamentarian, whose rulings stand unless overridden with 60 votes.

Republicans have said that if Democrats invoke reconciliation, they would respond by turning to Frumin to try to leave a health-care measure in tatters.

Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, said he has been researching Frumin’s role under reconciliation. He said he didn’t want to give Democrats advance warning by identifying the provisions he might target. “I’m not going there,” Coburn said.

Concern

The chamber’s No. 2 Democrat, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, said he was concerned that “just about any of the insurance reforms we’re talking about” could be eliminated by Frumin on grounds they aren’t connected to the budget. That includes provisions to bar insurance companies from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions.

Also vulnerable, said Senator Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, is a public insurance plan that Obama and many in his party consider crucial and is opposed by most Republicans.

Proposals designed to encourage preventive medicine may also be struck, said Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the finance panel’s top Republican.

The parliamentarian’s authority to alter legislation under reconciliation stems from the so-called Byrd Rule, named for Senator Robert Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who devised it. Durbin calls the rule “the most inscrutable thing I’ve ever dealt with” in the Senate.

‘Chopped Up’

Dove said that because of the position’s power, any health-care bill “has the potential of being very badly chopped up” under reconciliation. “It will be a huge mess.”

He declined to speculate on which provisions might run afoul of the rule, saying “only one person knows the answers to your questions -- his name is Alan Frumin.”

Dove said Frumin would probably drop anything the Congressional Budget Office said wouldn’t affect the budget. Even a provision that affects the budget may be deleted if Frumin concludes “the real reason that it’s there is not for its budgetary implications but for its policy implications,” Dove said.

As a hypothetical example, he said that as parliamentarian he would kill a provision barring the government from financing abortions because saving money wasn’t the reason it was put in a bill.

Lawmakers “get really ticked off” about such rulings, Dove said. “I made enemies by the score,” he said, recalling he once dropped 250 provisions from a bill.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Faler in Washington at   or bfaler@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: August 12, 2009 00:01 EDT