ObamaCare to Skip Conference Committee?
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.
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8 Responses to “ObamaCare to Skip Conference Committee?”
“making the President and the Speaker of the House look like lying hypocrites”
This, by now, is not new, or news.
Though the trend obviously was going against it, the House had the chance to try to move the legislation farther left and reclaim at least some measure of “psychic” or “symbolic” satisfaction from this. It now looks like nobody is going to be thrilled with this, and Rahm Emanuel and commentators' attempts to describe what finally gets passed in glowing terms will be especially pathetic.
At this point, we have to wait for Dem recovery a bit later — let's see what they do with new issues that have been deferred this past year, like union goodies (“card check”) or immigration “reform,” as well as progress in the Senate with energy (“climate”) legislation.
Prospects for such “progress” don't appear to be good right now. The economy later this year arguably, with its possibly bleak prospects, seems to have better prospects than “progressives” can expect, if the commentary on lefty talk radio is any indication.
Typical of the Nancy “the Hammer” Pelosi approach.
Same-ol same-ol.
At this stage, and with the past still fresh in my mind, I care so little about what the GOP has to say on the matter that it makes my head spin.
No one is coming to redress the bed and fluff your pillows. Lie down, stop with the complaining, leave the adults in peace. No, we're not going to check under the bed for socialists and we won't check your closet for federally funded abortions. Go to sleep.
Um, formal conference committees are never held in public either. This is a false dichotomy.
The reason to go this route is to expedite the process. Republicans can only filibuster it once instead of five times. Since the outcome is foreordained, GOP chances to grandstand – and prevent the Senate from dealing with other business – has been forestalled by this.
I hope everyone is enjoying the preview of the coming one party state where everything is done in the back room, individual pork deals are the norm, and the normal rules are meaningless.
As the Democrats gain more power, I doubt that the committees will even bother to meet and everything can be settled in a booth at The Palm.
Here! Here! My status as an independent is just getting more firm by the second (not like it was shaky or anything). And my firmly Democratic wife is changing here political affiliation to “independent” as well.
I have to admit that I'm failing to get upset about this.
Regarding the procedure, passing identical bills is completely legitimate, no? It's not like it's something shady like using budget reconciliation would have been. Normally, passing identical bills is difficult, which is why the conference process exists. But in this case, where one party has a supermajority, if they can get it done this way then there's nothing procedurally wrong with that. The majority has just as much right to use legitimate procedural maneuvers to make things easier for them as the minority does.
With regards to partisanship (excluding Republicans), sure, they're excluding republicans. But that's not new. They've accepted the fact that they are a supermajority and they are going to get this done with Democrats, for better or for worse. That decisions was already made before this most recent development. It would have made no difference if they had a conference committee, except that Republicans would have more opportunity to slow things down, but that's just a procedural point (see the first paragraph).
With regards to transparency, I'm not so sure that cameras would have been allowed in the conference proceedings, but maybe I'm mistaken about that. Even if they were, would that really let Obama off the hook for breaking his promise? When Obama promised C-span cameras in the negotiations, he just meant as the particular differences of two already-passed bills are hammered out in conference committee?
I could be persuaded, but right now I don't see this as something to get riled up over.