Slaughter House Rules: Constitution Being Gutted To Pass Health Care

[Guest guest]

Slaughter

House Rules: Constitution

Being Gutted To Pass Health Care wsj.com, MARCH 16, 2010

 

 

 

We're not sure American

schools teach civics any more, but once upon a time they taught that

under the U.S. Constitution a bill had to pass both the House and

Senate to become law. Until this week, that is, when Speaker Nancy

Pelosi is moving to merely "deem" that the House has passed the Senate

health-care bill and then send it to President Obama to sign anyway.

Under the

"reconciliation" process that began yesterday afternoon, the House is

supposed to approve the Senate's Christmas Eve bill and then use

"sidecar" amendments to fix the things it doesn't like. Those

amendments would then go to the Senate under rules that would let

Democrats pass them while avoiding the ordinary 60-vote threshold for

passing major legislation. This alone is an abuse of traditional Senate

process.

But Mrs. Pelosi &

Co. fear they lack the votes in the House to pass an identical Senate

bill, even with the promise of these reconciliation fixes. House

Members hate the thought of going on record voting for the Cornhusker

kickback and other special-interest bribes that were added to get this

mess through the Senate, as well as the new tax on high-cost insurance

plans that Big Labor hates.

So at the Speaker's

command, New York Democrat Louise Slaughter, who chairs the House Rules

Committee, may insert what's known as a "self-executing rule," also

known as a "hereby rule." Under this amazing procedural ruse, the House

would then vote only once on the reconciliation corrections, but not on

the underlying Senate bill. If those reconciliation corrections pass,

the self-executing rule would say that the Senate bill is presumptively

approved by the Houseeven without a formal up-or-down vote on the

actual words of the Senate bill.

Democrats would thus

send the Senate bill to President Obama for his signature even as they

claimed to oppose the same Senate bill. They would be declaring

themselves to be for and against the Senate bill in the same vote. Even

John Kerry never went that far with his Iraq war machinations. As we

went to press, the precise mechanics that Democrats will use remained

unclear, though yesterday Mrs. Pelosi endorsed this "deem and pass"

strategy in a meeting with left-wing bloggers.

This two-votes-in-one

gambit is a brazen affront to the plain language of the Constitution,

which is intended to require democratic accountability. Article 1,

Section 7 of the Constitution says that in order for a "Bill" to

"become a Law," it "shall have passed the House of Representatives and

the Senate." This is why the House and Senate typically have a

conference committee to work out differences in what each body passes.

While sometimes one house cedes entirely to another, the expectation is

that its Members must re-vote on the exact language of the other body's

bill.

As Stanford law

professor Michael McConnell pointed out in these pages yesterday, "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." If Congress can now

decide that the House can vote for one bill and the Senate can vote for

another, and the final result can be some arbitrary hybrid, then we

have abandoned one of Madison's core checks and balances.

Yes, self-executing

rules have been used in the past, but as the Congressional Research

Service put it in a 2006 paper, "Originally, this type of rule was used

to expedite House action in disposing of Senate amendments to

House-passed bills." They've also been used for amendments such as to a

1998 bill that "would have permitted the CIA to offer employees an

early-out retirement program"but never before to elide a vote on the

entire fundamental legislation.

We have entered a

political wonderland, where the rules are whatever Democrats say they

are. Mrs. Pelosi and the White House are resorting to these abuses

because their bill is so unpopular that a majority even of their own

party doesn't want to vote for it. Fence-sitting Members are being

threatened with primary challengers, a withdrawal of union support and

of course ostracism. Michigan's Bart Stupak is being pounded nightly by

MSNBC for the high crime of refusing to vote for a bill that he

believes will subsidize insurance for abortions.

 

Democrats are,

literally, consuming their own majority for the sake of imposing new

taxes, regulations and entitlements that the public has roundly

rejected but that they believe will be the crowning achievement of the

welfare state. They are also leaving behind a procedural bloody trail

that will fuel public fury and make such a vast change of law seem

illegitimate to millions of Americans.

The concoction has

become so toxic that even Mrs. Pelosi isn't bothering to defend the

merits anymore, saying instead last week that "we have to pass the bill

so that you can find out what is in it." Or rather, "deeming" to have

passed it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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