The process by which Congress wants to ram the health care takeover through has hit a bit of a snag. The House and Senate have not convened a conference committee to reconcile their respective bills and they do not intend to because that would require the Senate to go through its established voting procedures.
The scheme that has been devised is to use reconciliation, a process reserved for budget matters only, to pass a bill. Under the scheme, the House would have to vote for the Senate bill and then the Senate would use reconciliation to tweak the bill to please the members of the House. The problem is that once the bill is voted on by the House then there is a single, identical bill. It could be sent to Barack Obama and signed into law. This is one reason that many members of the House are not willing to vote for the Senate bill.
The House does not trust the Senate (and by extension, it does not trust Obama).
There were other schemes introduced to help ease the mistrust. The original plan to pass the bill and then tweak it is not popular because there is no guarantee the Senate would hold it until the tweaks are completed. That is now a non issue because the Senate parliamentarian has determined that reconciliation can only be used for an existing law. In other words, the Senate bill would have to be voted on by the House, signed into law by Obama and then reconciled with a simple majority of the Senate.
The House will not go for this because it does not want to take the chance that the Senate bill will become law without the changes the House wants.
So the Democrats are continuing to use convoluted logic to concoct new schemes. The House is considering enacting a rule saying that once they vote on the changes to the Senate bill the Senate bill will be deemed to have passed. In other words, they will vote for a rule change and if that rule change passes they will vote for the fixes to the bill and if that passes the Senate bill will be deemed to have passed. This would allow them to vote for what they want before they have a law to vote on.
It is likely that this is unconstitutional. And do they think Americans are so stupid that we cannot see what they are doing?
Just like Democrats though, change the rules during the game to get the outcome they want.
I have a feeling that this is going to take quite some time to work out because the Democrats are making up the rules as they go along and are doing everything, legal or not, to pass this albatross. This will likely not be voted on prior to the Easter break and if it makes it that far without getting a vote then it might not make it this year. Republicans have already indicated they will follow the reconciliation rules to the letter to keep any item that is not a budget item from passing. This means many of the fixes that the House wants will not make it through. The House Democrats, who are already uneasy, must be even more so after this latest news. They want to get this done soon because they have things to do.
Democrats have to get home to campaign for reelection. They have a lot of lies to tell and a lot of explaining to do.
Sources:
New York Post
Bloomberg
Washington Examiner
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