Slaughter House Rules - Passing the health-care bill

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703909804575123512773070080.html

by benpbenp • 16 years ago

10 24 16 years ago

online.wsj.com

conover• 16 years ago

I'm shocked that people are shocked that the party in power will bend the rules to serve their own ends. I'm sure if you look back to the heady days of the Bush administration, you would find opinion pieces written in the New York Times railing against how "we have entered a political wonderland" when the tax cuts, etc. were passed.

hga9• 16 years ago

Your argument might have more weight if you could point to a process abuse akin to "deeming" a bill as being passed without actually voting on it, especially if that bill is signed into law as required by the Senate parliamentarian but the Senate never manages to pass the reconciliation bill (the only one the House would actually vote on).

In the history of the Republic I can't remember anything even close to this.

sethg5• 16 years ago

If you don’t remember it happening before, it’s because nobody has made this much noise about it before. When Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House, for example, this very process was used 90 times. See the link I posted in my other comment.

sethg5• 16 years ago

The Constitution states (Article I, Section 5) that “Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings”, and even though the self-executing rule strikes me as a way to hack parliamentary procedure, every member who votes for that bill will know what its effect will be.

Also, the Republicans had no aversion to using self-executing rules back when they were in power. (http://mediamatters.org/research/201003150041)

hga9• 16 years ago

Self-executing rules may have issues, certainly, but this is the first time I've heard a fuss being made about that part of the Slaughter rule.

Everyone else is focusing on the prospect of the House "deeming" the Senate bill as being passed without actually voting on it. If you look at the actual "Right Wing Media" words that are quoted by Media Matters, you'll see that none of them include "self-executing".

This is an attempt at misdirection that doesn't hold up to even minimal examination.

sethg5• 16 years ago

Look at the quote from the CRS report:

This means that when the House adopts a rule it also simultaneously agrees to dispose of a separate matter, which is specified in the rule itself. For instance, self-executing rules may stipulate that a discrete policy proposal IS DEEMED TO HAVE PASSED THE HOUSE and been incorporated in the bill to be taken up. The effect: neither in the House nor in the Committee of the Whole will lawmakers have an opportunity to amend or to vote separately on the "self-executed" provision. It was automatically agreed to when the House passed the rule.

That report is from 2006.

sili• 16 years ago

Sometimes when a system is broken, hacking is the only way of getting something useful out of it.

matrix• 16 years ago

Oh please. Since when is something published on the opinion pages on the WSJ -- or any newspaper for that matter -- anything other than a political hit piece?

JeffJenkins• 16 years ago

It's silly to rail against this when this situation is being caused by the filibuster being used by Republicans in the senate.

I recently found out that it was in the last 50 years that the Senate implemented dual-tracking, which lets the senate just move on when there is a filibuster threat, drastically reducing the consequences of doing so for the minority party. Some details are here:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/how_dual...

I suspect the democrats would have fared better if they forced the republicans to filibuster 24/7 until public opinion turned against them for delaying work on other bills. It's important to remember that you only need 50 votes to pass the bill; 60 people only have to agree to let a vote happen. However, the democrats seem to have a much less effective political machine, so I can't imagine them making a move like this.

hga9• 16 years ago

Strange, I've read elsewhere that the cloture process was established in 1917.

sethg5• 16 years ago

To be more precise: if it weren’t for the filibuster, the House and Senate could have just reconciled the differences between their health-care reform bills in a conference committee, and the whole thing could have been passed the way we learned about it in Schoolhouse Rock. But the conference committee’s version of the bill could be filibustered again, and the Republicans are determined to do everything in the power of their 41-vote minority to block the bill.

The House could just pass the Senate bill and then pass a separate bill (through the budget reconciliation process, which may not be filibustered) that incorporates the compromise, but House Democrats seem to be afraid that once the Senate Democrats get their bill passed, they won’t cooperate with the second bill. (“The Republicans are the opposition. The Senate is the enemy.”)

hga9• 16 years ago

I haven't seen anyone explain how the prospect of Senate "betrayal" is diminished by application of the Slaughter rule, especially after the Senate parliamentarian ruled that reconciliation cannot commence until the original Senate bill is passed and signed into law by the President.

DanielBMarkham2• 16 years ago

I'm upvoting this because as a political junkie I believe a historical change is underway in how the United States government operates. As such, these changes should be important to small business owners from here on out, no matter what your party or policy preferences are. i.e., it's not just about the current party or current proposed law.

But heck if I'll make a comment about the politics. While the overall story is historically important, bickering over the individual case here doesn't seem like a good use of time for anybody.

hga9• 16 years ago

Indeed. Process changes, to the lower case "c" constitution (e.g. on the filibuster) or upper case "C" Constitution (potentially this one) are very important.

Changing the rules of the game will result in unknowable consequences, and as long as limited government is a distant memory our part of Main Street has to pay attention.

E.g. look at the Dodd bill that will decrease the number of angel investors by raising the net worth threshold and by either adding bureaucratic friction and delay or devolving regulation to the states. For all we know, angel financing in California could cease to exist in a few months or years.

(That's a different sort of "changing the rules of the game", but one of particular interest to all of us.)

DanielBMarkham2• 16 years ago

One rhetorical question, simply because I find the meta subject fascinating.

I wonder just how much the House is allowed to set it's own rules of conduct? Could, for instance, the Congress decide that whatever bills the president proposes would have the full effect of law without a follow-up vote?

I think the answer is no, but I'm not completely sure. Congress has ceded a heckuva lot of authority already to the executive branch in terms of regulatory authority. If the answer is no, then where is the line and who the heck would adjudicate? The Supreme Court? The Court has been extremely hesitant to go anywhere near the legislature, and for good reason, but if a majority party were to cede all voting rights for the body, I'm thinking somebody somewhere would have to call them on it. I guess that means the Supremes do have something of a role in the legislature.

It's also interesting that something has to go wrong, or there has to be a big political firestorm, and then suddenly everybody is a constitutional scholar. Kind of civics class by crisis. What a country.

timc• 16 years ago

how can facebook organize 400M people to tell each other what they ate for lunch, and yet we can't get ourselves organized to put pressure on the 535 people who are so interested in protecting their career politician status that they won't solve a single long term problem?

Slaughter House Rules - Passing the health-care bill

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