So, there may be no vote on the health care package this weekend because House Democrats suddenly decided that they want to wait for the CBO score? I don’t know about anyone else, but I read this as meaning that the House Democratic leadership believes–the pledges of “yes” votes from the likes of Dennis Kucinich notwithstanding–that they don’t have the votes.
Law professor and former Tenth Circuit judge Michael McConnell puts the issue succinctly on Speaker Pelosi’s proposed “deem and pass” scheme. I don’t have a WSJ subscription, but fortunately, Michael Cannon does, and he has excerpted the pertinent analysis:
Under Article I, Section 7, passage of one bill cannot be deemed to be enactment of another.
The Slaughter solution attempts to allow the House to pass the Senate bill, plus a bill amending it, with a single vote. The senators would then vote only on the amendatory bill. But this means that no single bill will have passed both houses in the same form. As the Supreme Court wrote in Clinton v. City of New York (1998), a bill containing the “exact text” must be approved by one house; the other house must approve “precisely the same text.”
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
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Posted in Chequer-Board
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Also tagged Barack Obama, Congress, Deem And Pass, Democrats, health care, Health Care Policy, Health Care Reform, House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, Obama Administration, Republicans, Self-Executing Rule, Senate
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Apparently, special deals in the health care bill are just fine, so long as they affect more than one state. I won’t be surprised if after a while, even that condition becomes negotiable.
No more evidence is needed to conclude that the health care reform effort has essentially turned into a farce. Nonetheless, more such evidence will likely be forthcoming.
It’s too bad that the White House didn’t spend more time working with people like Paul Ryan on how to responsibly reform health care. Instead, it spent time demonizing him for putting out a fiscal roadmap and for trying to offer alternative ideas on health care. Just about every Republican will remember the way the White House treated Ryan and those associated with him the next time a call for “bipartisanship” comes out from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The chief excuse used to justify the Democrats pending use of reconciliation to pass a supplemental health care bill–once the Senate’s version is presumably passed by the House–is that since Republicans used reconciliation in the past, Democrats can use it too. And specifically, since Republicans used reconciliation for things like “tax cuts for the rich!”, Democrats can use it to pass health care.
James Joyner points out that Democrats shouldn’t be allowed to get away with making this argument:
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
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Posted in Chequer-Board
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Also tagged Barack Obama, Congress, Democrats, health care, Health Care Policy, Health Care Reform, James Joyner, Megan McArdle, Obama Administration, Reconciliation, Republicans
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I am sure that at this point, the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats would be delighted and relieved to ram health care reform through Congress. I almost don’t blame them; the process has been long and arduous, to say the least. But the rules keep getting in the way:
Republicans said they won a parliamentary victory as they try to fight Democrats’ efforts to pass legislation to overhaul the U.S. health-care system.
Republicans said President Barack Obama has to sign a Senate health-care bill into law before the House and Senate can approve changes to it under a process called reconciliation. The Senate parliamentarian told Republicans that a reconciliation bill has to “make changes in law,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
“This would be another headwind for Democrats in the House” who oppose provisions in the Senate bill, said John Sullivan, a health-care analyst at Boston-based Leerink Swann & Co. “Their biggest fear has been that they vote for the Senate version and they never get the relief they’re looking for.”
Well, I’ve seen better.
The current poll standings are bad enough, but Patrick Caddell and Doug Schoen point out how much more unpopular the President and Democrats can become:
In “The March of Folly,” Barbara Tuchman asked, “Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests?” Her assessment of self-deception — “acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts” — captures the conditions that are gripping President Obama and the Democratic Party leadership as they renew their efforts to enact health-care reform.
Their blind persistence in the face of reality threatens to turn this political march of folly into an electoral rout in November. In the wake of the stinging loss in Massachusetts, there was a moment when the president and the Democratic leadership seemed to realize the reality of the health-care situation. Yet like some seductive siren of Greek mythology, the lure of health-care reform has arisen again.
March 11, 2010 – 12:10 am
The Senate Democrats won’t allow your anti-abortion language through on reconciliation if the House passes the Senate’s health care reform bill.
Something to consider as you decide whether to give your vote, and the votes of the House members in your coalition to the House Democratic leadership when the Senate’s health care reform bill comes up for a vote in the House.
I see that a great many people are discussing this profile of Rahm Emanuel by Peter Baker. As profiles go, it is a good one. But a central point emerging from the profile needs to be emphasized.
At this point, it really doesn’t matter whether Rahm Emanuel will go, or David Axelrod, or Valerie Jarrett, or Robert Gibbs, or some combination of the four. What really matters is the fact that “No Drama Obama” is now anything but.
So sayeth the Texas Monthly. It’s hard to disagree:
It may indeed “make sense” for Barack Obama to pose as an outside-the-Beltway type of figure, as Ron Fournier indicates, but anyone who buys the idea of the President of the United States being some kind of a leader of the revolt against an establishment–especially an establishment that has his own party control both chambers of Congress–deserves to get swindled at the polls.
I am late to this, but while the President is certainly a smart man, perhaps hosannas to his intelligence ought to be tempered by the fact that his current health care reform stance is in many ways diametrically opposed to the stance that he took during the election campaign, and that one of the anecdotes he used to advance his current arguments concerning health care reform revealed a less-than-intelligent side to the President.
