In the history of pointless ideas in politics, this one should not come as any surprise, except in terms of how pointless it seems. MSNBC is reporting that Congressional Democrats will seek to skip the normal conference committee process to combine the House and Senate versions of the health care bill and try to get one identical bill passed in each chamber which both can agree on.
Bill pong: All the attention on failed terrorist attack, as well as the likely attention on the economy this Friday, has placed the health-care debate on the backburner. And that might be the best thing to happen for the Dems and the Obama administration, because they can wrap it up away from the political spotlight. Per The New Republic’s Jon Cohn, “House and Senate Democrats are ‘almost certain’ to negotiate informally rather than convene a formal conference committee. Doing so would allow Democrats to avoid a series of procedural steps–not least among them, a series of special motions in the Senate, each requiring a vote with full debate–that Republicans could use to stall deliberations, just as they did in November and December. Cohn adds that the reconciliation will come via a game of legislative ping-pong.
As I said, not really shocking, and not even illegal. Unless, of course, we’ve finally manged to criminalize stupidity. (Ah, Dorthy, you’re not in Kansas any more.) The only problems with this approach is that, first, you’re still going to face a series of procedural roadblocks which are baked into the legislative process and, second, you’re making the President and the Speaker of the House look like lying hypocrites. Ed Morrissey explains better than I would have managed. (emphasis mine)
The idea is to bypass the public hearings that a conference committee could generate, as well as to exclude Republicans from representation at the talks. While the latter is completely predictable — after all, only a couple of Republicans were ever consulted on ObamaCare, and only to get past a filibuster vote — the former violates pledges made by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama during the last two elections. They explicitly demanded an end to backroom deals made in secret; Obama himself pledged to have all of the negotiations on health-care reform televised on C-SPAN.
This is still going to require a full vote, complete with debate yet again, cloture and the entire three ring circus we already witnessed. The only difference being that the “most transparent Congress Evah!” will be doing the back room deals which they decried so much during the early Bush II years.
Attention is turning away from health care these days to unemployment and terrorist attacks. Will that provide enough of a smoke screen to let this plan slide through? Hey, crazier things have happened in Washington.