March 18, 2010

There are a few things you should know about the "reconciliation" and Slaughter "deem it passed" processes that the Democrats are planning to use, to get around the fact that they don't have the votes to pass a healthcare bill the normal way.

First, the Slaughter "deem it passed" procedure would be the first time in American history in which a bill was deemed to be enacted without being passed in identical form by both the House and Senate.

It is blatantly illegal and plainly unconstitutional, being contrary to Article 1, Sec. 7 of the U.S. Constitution, which requires that "every bill" which becomes law "shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate" before it goes to the President to be signed or vetoed.

Second, "reconciliation" isn't what you probably think it is.

You might be a bit perplexed by all this "reconciliation" talk. Maybe you thought you were pretty well informed about the federal lawmaking process, but now you've been hearing that reconciled health bills can't be filibustered, which surprises you. In fact, you might even recall some examples where House and Senate versions of a bill were reconciled in conference committee, but the compromise bill was then filibustered in the Senate.

So, what's going on?

A scam, that's what. The "reconciliation" they're talking about is not reconciling two versions of the bill. Rather, it is actually budget reconciliation, which is something entirely different.

The reason they say "reconciliation" rather than "budget reconciliation" is to obfuscate the dishonesty of what they are doing.

Budget reconciliation is a process for passing a new law (called a budget reconciliation bill) which amends an already-passed budget law, to bring it into conformance with a previously-passed budget resolution.

The purpose is to reduce budget deficits. Budget Reconciliation is designed to give some baby teeth to budget resolutions, when subsequently-passed budget bills contain higher spending than the budget resolutions called for.

The Democrats are not reconciling HR 3200 with HR 3590. Rather, they are discarding HR 3200 entirely, pretending ("deeming") that HR 3590 passed, and then amending HR 3590 through the Budget Reconciliation process.

However:

1. It's not a budget bill!
2. The bill being amended hasn't passed, and isn't law!
3. Enacting the reconciliation bill won't bring anything into conformance with a budget resolution!
4. It won't reduce the deficit, it will increase it!

The Democrats' spin is that Republicans have used this process in the past, so they have no right to complain when Democrats use it. The truth is that both Republicans and Democrats have used Budget Reconciliation to bring already passed budgets into conformance with previously passed budget resolutions, only. Nobody has ever suggested using it to enact massive new government programs, until now.

Congress now has two healthcare bills:

• HR 3200 (which does not fund abortions) was passed by the House.
   
  
• HR 3590 (which does fund abortions) was passed by the Senate.

(HR 3590 was done as a Senate amendment which entirely replaced the text of an unrelated minor House bill, which is how the Senate bill got an "HR" bill number. They had to do it this way to skirt the Constitution, because the bill raises taxes, and Article 1, Sec. 7 says, "All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.")

Legally, there are three things they can do to get a bill passed:

1. The Senate can simply pass HR 3200, unaltered. (But they don't have the votes.)

2. The House can pass HR 3590, unaltered. (But they don't have the votes.)

3. The two bills (HR3200 & HR3590) could be reconciled in a conference committee, which tries to pick and choose between the provisions of the two bills, and produce a compromise which will be acceptable to both houses. Then the compromise bill should be sent to both houses for debate and votes -- and in the Senate, a possible filibuster.

That's how the legislative process works -- or how it always has, until now.

But the Democrats don't think they can actually come up with a compromise bill that will pass in both the House and Senate. So they're not even trying. In fact, they didn't even appoint a conference committee.

Instead, they plan to discard HR 3200, and "deem" HR 3590 to have passed the House, without the House members actually voting on it.

I'm not kidding.

The "deeming" will be a line in the budget reconciliation bill (which isn't actually a budget reconciliation bill at all). Obama will sign HR 3590 into law as soon as the House passes the reconciliation bill with the "deeming" line in it, pretending that the House's passing of the reconciliation bill with the deeming line is equivalent to them passing the original HR 3590 (which it obviously isn't). Then the reconciliation bill goes to the Senate, for debate and amendment and possible defeat. When the Senate parliamentarian rules that what the Democrats are trying to do is out of order, they promise to bring in Biden (as President of the Senate) to lie & overrule the parliamentarian.

When the dust settles, they will have HR 3590 (the version that funds abortions) signed into law (regardless of whether the reconciliation bill ever passes), and yet the House will never have actually voted for it!

This is absolutely unprecedented, and the most blatantly crooked spectacle that I've ever seen in Congress.

Digression: The Democrats lack the 60 votes to pass it in the Senate because the newest Senator, Scott Brown, R-MA, is pledged to vote "no." [That pledge was a cornerstone of his improbable campaign to win the safest of safe Democratic seats.] If the Democrats had started with only 59 seats, they could have persuaded any of several liberal Republicans to join them. But since they didn't think they needed any Republican votes, they didn't bother with bipartisanship, or even basic courtesy. Now, thanks to the Massachusetts voters, they suddenly need one Republican vote, but it's too late: their bare-knuckles partisanship [and the voters' wrath] has burned that bridge: not even Olympia Snow will join them, now.

If the the Obama/Pelosi/Reed cabal actually succeed in this scheme, the lawsuits will immediately start, along with open revolt by some of the States. Idaho has already passed a defiant state law designed to thwart the federal takeover of healthcare, and 36 other States are considering such laws.

 
Dave Burton
Cary, NC
H: 1-919-481-0098
http://www.burtonsys.com/email/
 
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References:
 
Washington Post: Reconciliation on health care would be an assault to the democratic process, by Orrin Hatch
 
FOXNews.com (AP): Attorneys General in South Carolina and Florida Set to Sue on Health Care Reform
 

The News & Observer declined to run this guest op-ed, but they did run a shorter Letter to the Editor, which generated a few on-line comments. One of the comments (from "bigsurmac") regurgitated some talking points from the Obama disinformation machine, and I replied (as "dave36"):
 

Health shenanigans

Do you think you know what "reconciliation" is? I'll bet you don't. It isn't reconciling differences between House and Senate health care bills. It's actually budget reconciliation, which amends an already-passed budget law to conform with a previously passed budget resolution to reduce deficits.
 
But ObamaCare isn't a budget bill, hasn't passed, isn't being brought into conformance with a budget resolution and increases rather than reduces deficits. So budget reconciliation isn't applicable. The Democrats know that but don't care. When the Senate parliamentarian rules it illegal, Joe Biden, as president of the Senate, will overrule him.
 
It gets worse. Under the Slaughter "deem scheme," they'll discard the House bill and "deem" the Senate bill to have passed the House, without House members actually voting on it. I'm not kidding! Never in history has a bill been deemed enacted without being passed in identical form by both House and Senate. It's blatantly unconstitutional. Article 1 of the Constitution requires that "every bill" that becomes law "shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate" before it goes to the president to be signed.
 
The Democrats are shredding the Constitution to seize control of health care. Remember in November!
 
Dave Burton, Cary
 

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bigsurmac wrote on March, 20 9:43 AM:
 
During Speaker Tip O'Neill's (D-Mass.) final term in the 99th Congress, there were 20 self-executing rules (12 percent).(Most to secure passage of legislation sought by Pres. Reagan, with members of his own party opposing.)
During Rep. Jim Wright's (D-Texas) only full term as Speaker, in the 100th Congress, there were 18 self-executing rules (17 percent).
They reached a high point of 30 under Speaker Tom Foley (D-Wash.) during the final Democratic Congress, the 103rd, for 22 percent of all rules.
When Republicans took power in 1995:
Under Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.);
There were 38 and 52 self-executing rules in the 104th and 105th Congresses (1995-1998), making up 25 percent and 35 percent of all rules, respectively.
Under Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) there were 40, 42 and 30 self-executing rules in the 106th, 107th and 108th Congresses (22 percent, 37 percent and 22 percent, respectively)- for a 30.3 per cent average.
Want to explain Nancy Pelosi's low, low total to date?
 
 

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dave36 wrote on March, 20 8:57 PM:
 
BigSurMac, you've been misled by the Obama/Democrat spin machine. Here's some truth:
 
"Every one of the examples cited in the 2006 CRS report involved the adoption, via a self-executing rule, of an AMENDMENT to a piece of pending legislation. The rules cited in the report including the ban on smoking on airline flights were rules that made it in order for the House to consider a piece of legislation, and the rule deemed certain amendments to that pending legislation to have been adopted. The House still, however, had to vote yea or nay on the final bill, as adopted. ... [But in this case,] the rule would deem the BILL itself to have been adopted. That is completely different from the examples cited by the CRS report."
http://usgovinfo.about.com/b/2010/03/16/the-self-executing-rule-and-the-health-care-bill.htm
 
What they are trying to do is unprecedented and completely illegal. The Constitution requires that both the House and Senate pass exactly the same bill, by voting on exactly the same bill. But the Democrats are planning to (to quote the Washington Post headline) "pass Senate health-care bill without voting on it."[WP]

Dave

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