If you’re confused by the tactics being employed by the Democrats to ram through their devastating health care legislation, you aren’t alone.
Rep. Devin Nunes was on Fox News earlier today to explain what the House Budget Committee is doing. They’re going to pass a bill that hasn’t been scored. They have no idea what’s in the bill. This is unprecedented. Nunes said you have a better chance of seeing a leprechaun on St. Patrick’s day than seeing this legislation save us any money. For the record, no Democrat from the House Budget Committee would appear to defend the maneuver on Fox News.
For more information on the “shell bill” see Maggie’s post from earlier today. Apparently, the reconciliation bill released late last night isn’t the final reconciliation bill.
Here is how the “shell” bill works. Philip Klein writing at The American Spectator says this is not the “actual reconciliation bill.” He quotes Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) saying that this bill is a “shell” bill. Democrats will approve it, probably today, it will go to the Rules Committee, “be stripped,” and then all the things they have supposedly negotiated will be added in.
Ryan says the process begins with the Budget committee approving the “shell” bill, then the bill goes to the Rules Committee. In the budget committee, Republicans are out-numbered 2-to-1, and do not have the votes to stop it. Republicans will not be able to offer any amendments, but can offer “motions to instruct the Rules Committee, which will hopefully show the outlandish maneuver Democrats are taking for what it is – unconstitutional. Illegal?
No matter how you slice it, Senator Lamar Alexander was right, we are witnessing “the most brazen act of political arrogance since Watergate.” But this is worse. At least Watergate didn’t involve taking over one sixth of our economy while fundamentally changing the relationship between the American people and the government.
Alexander was also right when he said the American people don’t want this. By a large margin Americans don’t want this but the Democrats are sticking it to us anyway. Without our consent! Because Obama, Pelosi and Reid think they know better. Or do they? Do they really believe they know better, or do they just want the state to have power over the individual? And what better power than the power over life and death.
[Quoting Maggie again] Ed Morrisey, writing before it was clear that this is a shell bill, asked what the bill might contain that makes it ineligible for reconciliation and points out page 1557 of the existing reconciliation calls for the creation of a Comparative Effectiveness Center (panel) which finds ways to ration health care based on certain parameters, one of which in the bill is “Economics.” Much of the newly written bill will surely contain language from this one. We can count on the Comparative Effectiveness Center also being included.
How can they add that sort of language without full debate in the Senate?
As for whether what they’re doing is constitutional – the answer is an emphatic no! Michael McConnell made that clear in The Wall Street Journal.
To become law—hence eligible for amendment via reconciliation—the Senate health-care bill must actually be signed into law. The Constitution speaks directly to how that is done. According to Article I, Section 7, in order for a “Bill” to “become a Law,” it “shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate” and be “presented to the President of the United States” for signature or veto. Unless a bill actually has “passed” both Houses, it cannot be presented to the president and cannot become a law. To be sure, each House of Congress has power to “determine the Rules of its Proceedings.” Each house can thus determine how much debate to permit, whether to allow amendments from the floor, and even to require supermajority votes for some types of proceeding. But House and Senate rules cannot dispense with the bare-bones requirements of the Constitution. 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.”
These constitutional rules set forth in Article I are not mere exercises in formalism. They ensure the democratic accountability of our representatives. Under Section 7, no bill can become law unless it is put up for public vote by both houses of Congress, and under Section 5 “the Yeas and Nays of the Members of either House on any question . . . shall be entered on the Journal.” These requirements enable the people to evaluate whether their representatives are promoting their interests and the public good. Democratic leaders have not announced whether they will pursue the Slaughter solution. But the very purpose of it is to enable members of the House to vote for something without appearing to do so. The Constitution was drafted to prevent that.
President Obama, the Constitutional law professor, doesn’t seem to mind any of this. He has been too busy meeting behind closed doors with lobbyists and promising all sorts of goodies to members who vote for the bill to bother with Constitutional technicalities. You know, why let a fundamentally flawed document get in the way of transforming America?
Update: The Other McCain covered the health care games played today in the House. I’m so sick of health care I couldn’t bear the thought of doing a separate post.
Update 2 Neil Cavuto interviewed Mark Levin about the Slaughter Rule earlier. I wanted to post the video at the time I wrote this but it wasn’t available at the time. Levin calls this an unconstitutional, brazen power grab by the Democrats.
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