In 2009, Democrats chose to proceed with a health-care bill under the regular order – that is, they sought to pass the legislation under normal House and Senate rules. They did not put together a budget reconciliation bill with health care in it, something that could have passed the Senate with a simple majority vote. They conceded that such an approach would likely produce a flawed product, as many non-budgetary provisions in a health-care plan would not survive the reconciliation process. And so they decided to try and pass a bill without resorting to reconciliation, even though they knew they would need sixty votes in the Senate to succeed. It worked. They passed a bill in the House in November, and a somewhat different version in the Senate in December.
Then came Scott Brown. His stunning election to the Senate on January 19 upended the Democrats’ end-game. They were going to work out the differences between the House and Senate-passed bills in January and proceed to pass an agreed-upon version in both chambers as expeditiously as possible. But that plan was contingent on getting sixty votes again in the Senate. With Brown’s election, Senate Republicans increased their numbers from forty to forty-one, thus forcing Democrats to find at least one Republican Senator to support their final bill.
For the past two months, the White House and Democrats in Congress have been weaving ever-more complicated legislative webs all with the express intent of avoiding at all costs any need to negotiate with the now slightly enlarged Senate minority. In effect, what Democratic leaders want to do is – at the very end of the legislative process – switch from regular order to a reconciliation process in order to avoid having to deal seriously with any elected Republicans.
But it’s become increasingly clear that the Democratic scheming and maneuvering necessary to pull off such a high-wire act has created a web of entanglements that could very well doom passage of the entire effort.
In particular, there now appear to be two huge hurdles standing directly in the way of a plan to jam a bill through in the coming days.
First, there is the matter of the liberal abortion provisions in the Senate bill. As the Catholic Bishops conference has noted the Senate-passed bill includes several provisions that would allow taxpayer funding of elective abortions. Consequently, the Bishops opposed passage of that bill when it was considered in the Senate, and now oppose its passage by the House. The problem for House Democrats is that every version of the end-game they are now considering is predicated on having the House take up the Senate bill and pass it unchanged for presidential signature.
That is entirely unacceptable to the Catholic Bishops. They oppose House passage of the Senate’s pro-abortion health bill. Period. And their opposition hasn’t come with procedural loopholes that would let members off the hook if they promised to pass a fix separately. That would be fool’s bargain, and the Bishops know it. So pro-life House Democrats, led by Congressman Bart Stupak, really have no choice here. They can’t support the Senate bill unless they want to be known for supporting the most pro-abortion bill ever considered in Congress. Their only real option is to force House leaders to amend the Senate bill before passing it to include strong restrictions on funding of abortion. Yes, that would mean the bill would have to go back through the Senate again before going to the president, but so be it. That’s not the Bishops’ problem. It would mean the president and the Democrats would have to really negotiate to get some Republican support, which is of course the norm for sweeping and important legislation.
This post originally appeared at National Review Online.
Last January, Senators Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) introduced an amendment which would have taken the first steps toward restoring fiscal responsibility in Washington. While the amendment failed to attain the necessary 60 votes for passage, it did gain strong bipartisan support, with 16 Democrats joining all but one Republican voting for the measure. Fortunately, all hope is not lost.
The amendment, which would cap discretionary spending increases at two percent per year, is expected to come up for a second vote tomorrow. The spending caps would mark a distinct departure from the recent past, when annual increases have reached as high as 12.2 percent. While restrictions on discretionary spending alone can not solve the nation’s fiscal troubles, adoption of this amendment would mark an important start.
Since the first vote failed on January 28th debt held by the public has increased by $88 billion and President Obama’s own budget projects this figure to more than double from $7.5 trillion in 2009 to a record $18.6 trillion by 2020. At some point this borrow and spend policy must come to an end. The next roll call vote for the bipartisan Sessions-McCaskill amendment will reveal which Senators are serious about budget restraint, and which are committed to the status-quo.