Rep. David Dreier and Republican leaders are accusing House Democrats of trying to “seriously bend the rules” to pass health care reform this week. The GOP is charging that the Democrats will try to pass a “fix” to a health care bill that they haven’t voted on.
It’s a bit complicated, but Republicans are using the scary label “The Slaughter Solution” keying off of Rules Committee Chairman Rep. Louise Slaughter’s name. They say the Democrats can use a procedural tactic to send the Senate-passed health care bill straight to the president for a signature. Or they could “deem” the Senate bill as passed only after the House passes the fix measure through budget reconciliation. Finally they could write a rule putting a condition that the Senate bill would only pass if the reconciliation bill passes.
Those options are indeed within the rules, and just might ease the heartburn House Democrats are feeling, since many of them don’t like the Senate bill without the fixes carefully negotiated by leadership from both chambers and the White House. Republicans say any of those options are fundamentally unfair, and would skip important steps in the process. But Democrats say Dreier and the rest of the Republicans are full of it, and leadership is telling rank-and-file members to ignore complaints about procedure and avoid debates about legislative process.
“Things like reconciliation and what the rules committee does is INSIDE BASEBALL. People who try and start arguments about process on this are almost always against the actual policy substance too, often times for purely political reasons,” members were told Friday in a memo, obtained by TPMDC.
Dreier, the ranking Republican on the Rules Committee, told reporters today that regardless of how Democrats vote on either the Senate bill or the reconciliation measure, the GOP will still target them as having voted for the Senate bill. “Just because you use a bat to hit a ball instead of throwing it, your neighbor’s window is still just as broken. A vote for the rule is a vote for the Senate bill. There is no getting around that fact,” Dreier wrote in a memo sent to reporters today.
He added:
They can break any arm, bend any rule. But the Democratic Majority cannot deny that they are turning the process of our democracy on its head in an effort to achieve a highly unpopular, partisan objective.
Dreier would know about the process – he helped get the Republican majority’s agenda through Congress when they were in charge. A Congressional aide told TPMDC the options laid out in Dreier’s memo aren’t unusual. In fact, the Democrats used this tactic recently to increase the nation’s debt limit.
“We’re looking at a couple of different ways to get the bill to the floor and any path we take will obviously require a majority House vote,” Slaughter spokesman Vincent Morris told me today. “And it’s worth pointing out that whatever we do will be built upon the precedents of the house and familiar to Republicans from when they held the majority.”
Slaughter told Brian recently she believed Democrats would have to pass the Senate bill first, followed by the smaller reconciliation bill. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said as much last week, though none of the final decisions have been publicized. We should have a better idea later this week.
In the memo, Dreier details the five scenarios Democrats could implement to avoid having wary House members vote on a Senate health care bill they don’t like:
Scenario 1: “Play it Straight” Rule provides for an up or down vote Rule provides for an up or down vote
Scenario 2: “Slaughter Solution 1” Rule “deems” the Senate bill passed immediately and sends the bill to the President Rule provides for an up or down vote
Scenario 3: “Slaughter Solution 2” Rule “deems” the Senate bill passed upon House adoption of reconciliation sidecar Rule provides for an up or down vote
Scenario 4: “Slaughter Solution 3” Rule “deems” the Senate bill passed when the Senate passes the reconciliation sidecar Rule provides for an up or down vote
Scenario 5: “The Double Whammy” Rule #2 “deems” the Senate bill passed immediately and sends the bill to the President Rule # 1 allows the Rules Committee to turn off the Motion to Recommit. Rule # 2 “deems” the side car bill passed immediately and sends the bill to the Senate
Dreier also adopts the psy-ops strategy we wrote about last week, suggesting that reconciliation is no guarantee for squeamish House Democrats.
“It requires a leap of faith that the Senate won’t change anything and — with all due respect to the Senate — that faith is misplaced. Institutionally, they simply can’t guarantee that outcome,” he wrote in the memo.
Late Update: Time’s Karen Tumulty has a good writeup here about how the Republicans have used these tactics plenty of times.
