House to take up corrected reconciliation bill ton

<p><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', times, serif; font-size: 17px;"><p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;"><h1 style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 1.8em; font-weight: bold; padding: 0px;">House to take up corrected reconciliation bill tonight</h1><p><span style="font-size: small;"><div id="byline" style="font-style: italic;">By&nbsp;<a style="text-decoration: underline; color: #0c4790;" title="Send an e-mail to Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray" href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/articles/lori+montgomery+and+shailagh+murray/">Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray</a></div></span></p><p>Washington Post Staff Writer&nbsp;<br />Thursday, March 25, 2010; 9:57 AM</p><p><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', times, serif; font-size: 17px;">Senate Republicans have identified two minor violations of reconciliation rules in the final piece of the health-care package. The violations will force the Senate to change the reconciliation bill and ship it to the House of Representatives for final passage.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', times, serif; font-size: 17px;"><p>But Democratic leaders said the provisions that will be struck -- from the part of the bill dealing with Pell Grants for college students -- do not significantly affect the student loan program or the health-care bill overall.</p><p><strong>The corrected legislation most likely will not be subjected to additional challenges when it is sent back to the House, Democratic staffers said. House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (MD) said in a statement that if the Senate passes the reconciliation bill in a final vote Thursday afternoon, as expected, the House will take up the corrected bill Thursday evening.</strong></p><p>Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), told reporters shortly after 3 a.m. that Senate parliamentarian Alan Frumin "struck two minor provisions tonight from in the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act."</p><p><strong>Manley said the deletions would allow the bill to be passed by the Senate, which he called "a big win for the American people."</strong></p><p><p>For much of Wednesday and into Thursday morning, Senate Republicans offered dozens of amendments to the bill President Obama<a style="text-decoration: underline; color: #0c4790;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/23/AR2010032301071.html">signed into law Tuesday</a>. Their goal was to force the legislation that will launch&nbsp;<a style="text-decoration: underline; color: #0c4790;" href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/health-care-reform/">an overhaul of the nation's health-care system.</a>back to the House for another vote. But when the Senate began voting shortly after 5 p.m., all 29 amendments were easily rejected.</p><p><strong>That means the health-care package survived essentially intact, save for the deletion of the two clauses in the reconciliation bill that were found to violate reconciliation rules, the complicated set of procedures that protected the bill from filibuster.</strong></p><p><strong>A senior Democratic aide said one of the problematic items is a "hold-harmless provision," which was designed to prevent reductions in individual student grants if appropriated funds for Pell Grants declines. The second adjustment was described as "a conforming change, to strike ob