

Slaughter House Rules - Passing the health-care bill - benpbenp
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703909804575123512773070080.html

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JeffJenkins
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...](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-
klein/2010/03/how_dual-tracking_destroyed_th.html)

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.

~~~
sethg
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.”)

~~~
hga
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.

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sethg
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>)

~~~
hga
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.

~~~
sethg
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.

~~~
hga
You still need to come up with an example where the final language for a bill
was "deemed" passed without actually being voted on. As far as I can tell from
these excerpts, they apply to the process prior to final passage.

ADDED: if the Republicans had "deemed" the final language of a bill as being
passed without actually holding a vote on it don't you think the Democrats
would still be screaming about how they had "shredded the Constitution!" etc.
etc.?

~~~
sethg
I’m really not enough of a politics junkie to know when this maneuver was used
for the _final_ language of a bill and when it was used for something else. It
seems clear to me, however, that if the maneuver is constitutionally OK for
one kind of House resolution, it’s OK for every kind of resolution.

Nothing is being “passed without actually being voted on”. There will be one
vote, which will simultaneously have two effects: one described by the
procedural rule, and one described in the text of the bill itself. Every
Representative who votes on the bill will be perfectly aware of those two
effects and can choose to vote yea or nay accordingly. And then the majority
will rule, which is more than we get from the Senate.

~~~
hga
OK, but I think it would be best to focus on the point that your opponents are
arguing about, a final up or down vote on the final language of a bill, and
not the red herring of how the sausage that comprises that bill has been made.

Especially in the current context where everyone has had a chance to analyze
the 2,700 pages of the Senate bill that was passed ~ 2.5 months ago.

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matrix
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?

I vote we leave this stuff to the Huffington Post, and get back to what HN
does best: ^Top (3|5|7|10) (ways to|most annoying|tips for|coolest)
(dropout|VC|programmer|hacker) (under 25|in just one year|teen)
(founder|failure)

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conover
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.

~~~
hga
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.

~~~
sethg
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.

~~~
byteCoder
"tu quoque" (party A did this so that makes it right for party B) is not a
valid argument. If it was unconstitutional then, it's still unconstitutional
now (even if it's now a tradition). (Cf. Gephardt Rule)

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timc
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?

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DanielBMarkham
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.

~~~
hga
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.)

~~~
DanielBMarkham
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.

~~~
hga
" _Kind of civics class by crisis._ "

And one should be cogent of the maxim that "Hard cases make bad law." That
from the judicial side of things, but apropos here.

On the other hand, I think we're fortunate to have a meta-process that the
public is involved in, that seems to work better than a lot of the
alternatives.

As for your question and uncertainty, I've seen quite a bit of good discussion
at The Volokh Conspiracy in the comments to various postings
(<http://volokh.com/>, it's a high quality group law blog by various law
professors and the like). (In fact, if you haven't visited it before, check it
out, all sorts of tasty stuff right now, e.g. the 11th Circuit has just made
what is possibly a bad ruling on email and 4th Amendment search and seizure. I
wish I had time to follow it...).

In the discussions you'll find some comments on at least one prior ruling by
the Supremes in this area; they are very reluctant but not entirely so.

