It's fall in Washington, and the smell of fear is wafting through the halls of Congress. Economic dissatisfaction, anti-incumbent rage, and plain old fatigue are endangering legislators who know the next election is just thirteen months away. Click through this TNR slideshow to see profiles of the members of Congress who are most vulnerable in 2010.
This week, the District of Columbia's city council introduced a bill that would authorize same-sex marriages within its boundaries. According to the Associated Press, the measure "appears unstoppable"—garnering support from most council members, the mayor, and a lack of opposition from the Democratic Congress. Depending how you count, that would make D.C. anywhere from the fifth to the eighth U.S. jurisdiction to legalize gay marriage.
My Saturday began on the West lawn of Capitol Hill, where conservative activists were mounting one final, desperate effort to block health care reform. They came by the thousands, carrying flags and pushing strollers, in a demonstration of genuine grassroots fervor. They chanted “Kill the Bill,” over and over again, in a vaguely menacing tone that, perhaps, foretold a bit of ugliness to come.
What a way to run a government:
Here is the ultimate paradox of the Great Health Care Showdown: Congress will divide along partisan lines to pass a Republican version of health-care reform, and Republicans will vote against it.
Yes, Democrats have rallied behind a bill that large numbers of Republicans should love. It is built on a series of principles that Republicans espoused for years.
Sarah Binder is a professor of political science at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is the author of several books on Congress, including Stalemate (Brookings 2003) and Politics or Principle? Filibustering in the U.S. Senate (Brookings 1997) co-authored with Steven Smith.
All eyes this weekend will be on the House, as it takes up health care reform for what is possibly (and hopefully) the last time. The goal is to pass two legislative measures: The Senate’s health care bill, which is the underlying bill that does most of the work of health care reform; and a series of amendments to the Senate bill, which are going through the budget reconciliation process and will still require Senate approval to become law.
As you can see, the legislative process stopped resembling Schoolhouse Rock a long time ago. For those who want to follow the proceedings--but have no idea how those proceedings will, er, proceed—here is a guide.
For the House to consider any major bill on the floor, the chamber needs to agree first on a procedure for debating, amending, and voting on the bill. That procedure is called a rule and, naturally, it is the Rules Committee that writes it. In most cases the Rules Committee will write what is known as a "special" or "restrictive" rule. Special rules come in all shapes and sizes, including the now notorious "self-executing" rule—the one that allows the House to pass a bill by approving the rule, rather than directly voting on the bill itself. Before debate on a bill can actually begin, the bill’s rule must get approval from both the Rules Committee and the full House.
So how is the process likely to unfold? We can’t be entirely sure of all the details yet, but it will likely start on Saturday when the Rules Committee meets, most likely in its usual room in the Capitol—a tight squeeze with just a handful of spectator seats. At that point, the committee will unveil its recommended special rule and debate it. We don’t know yet for sure what the rule will say. There will most likely be that self-executing provision that “deems” the Senate-passed health care bill as passed by the House upon adoption of the rule or upon House passage of the reconciliation bill.
(In theory, the rule could deem the Senate bill passed only after the Senate votes for the reconciliation package. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has ruled out that option, citing the parliamentary complications it would create.)
My hunch is that there will also be a provision in the rule that prohibits amendments from being offered on the floor to the reconciliation bill. In the parlance, this is known as a “closed” rule—closed that is to amendments. Republicans relied on closed rules when they controlled the House, a practice they inherited from the Democrats who ruled before them.
Republicans on the Rules Committee will probably try to amend the rule in the committee, so that the rule is more palatable to the GOP. But the majority party will prevail because the Rules Committee is stacked: Nine Democrats and four Republicans. This is by design: It’s through the Rules Committee that the majority party in the House exerts much of its control. And it’s nothing new: Democrats learned to stack the committee this way from the Republicans, who learned it from the Democrats.
When the committee completes consideration of the special rule, they will vote to report it to the full House. And that brings us to what’s likely to happen on Sunday.
As many of you know, the controversy over abortion rights has been threatening to undermine health care reform. And a big reason is the actions of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who have steadfastly opposed reform because, they claim, it would allow for federal funding of abortion. Democrats who oppose abortion rights or represent districts with lots of voters who oppose abortion rights have been reluctant to cross the Bishops on this matter. Many have said they won’t support a bill without stronger abortion restrictions.
Mitt Romney lays out his plan to repeal Romneycare... I mean, Obamacare:
Shortly after Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou took office last fall, he learned that he’d inherited a massive booby prize: a budget deficit that was twice the amount the previous government had disclosed. But, when Papandreou came clean and promised to address the problem, the financial markets reacted violently. Interest rates soared, adding billions in debt-service costs to an already dire budget picture.
If you take a look around at what is happening in states and localities across the country, the time for immigration reform seems ripe. In 2009 states considered more than 1500 laws concerning immigrants and immigration, and 353 became law in 48 states, according the National Conference of State Legislatures. In various municipalities, countless others were proposed and/or passed. Many of these measures--both restrictive and inclusive--are borne out of frustration with the status quo.
Today's Wall Street Journal editorial:
In rapid succession, the AARP and American Medical Association (AMA) have endorsed health care reform. This is consistent with what they've said all year long. And it's important all the same.
Democrats need both groups' support, not because of their fundraising clout but because of their credibilty with the public. Older voters, in particular, take cues from the groups. When conservatives say the Democrats want to kill Medicare or, worse, kill Grandma, it helps when Democrats can respond by citing the approval of these two organizations.
Democrats in the administration and Congress have agreed on a set of amendments to the Senate health care bill. And, according to House leadership, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is certifying that the amendments will reduce the deficit. That should fulfill the parliamentary requirements of the reconciliation process, satisfy the demands of many nervous Democrats, and clear the way for the House to vote on health care reform.
From: Ben Wildavsky
To: Diane Ravitch, Richard Rothstein, and Kevin Carey
Subject: Ravitch misunderstands the roles of charter schools, teacher professionalism, and bipartisanship in education reform.
Not long ago, Tavis Smiley did something I would not have expected, which is rare. He announced that he was discontinuing his annual State of the Black Union conferences. These have been powwows where the Usual Suspects are invited to make the usual points: roughly decrying racism while genuflecting to the radical idea that people are responsible for repairing their own culture too. They have had black conservatives sprinkled in for “balance,” to be sure, but we all know the drill.
Op-eds by members of Congress, present or former, are rarely worth reading. Today's Washington Post provides one that is. It's about health care reform and its author is Marjorie Margolies.
I've written a fair bit about black carbon, a form of soot created by incompletely burning biomass. Wood cookstoves in the developing world are one big culprit. The dark soot particles settle on snow and ice and absorb more sunlight; recent studies have found they contribute quite a bit to Arctic ice-melt and the wilting of Himalayan glaciers.
It's Wednesday morning. House leaders have indicated they want to vote on both the Senate health care bill and amendments to it by Saturday night. But, as you may have noticed, they still haven't said precisely what the wording of those amendments will be. And that's because they still haven't finalized them.
From: Diane Ravitch
To: Kevin Carey
Subject: We don't yet have all the answers for fixing American education, but we know current reforms aren't working. So why keep supporting them?
Earlier this month,the conservative organization Keep America Safe launched a p.r. fusillade against Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys who represented Guantánamo detainees. “The crux of the matter,” says Liz Cheney, chair of the organization, “is the American people have a right to know whether lawyers who used to represent and advocate on behalf of terrorists” are working at DOJ. They just want to know who the terrorist lawyers are. An innocent question, to be sure.
The controversy over the "deem-and-pass" strategy will probably end very quickly. (I expect Democrats to conclude it's not worth the hassle.) But it's another telling episode in the health care saga. Conservatives have spent the last day in a fit of outrage at the prospect that House Democrats might enact the Senate health care bill and changes to it in one vote rather than two.
Like a lot of writers, I have a Facebook page where I post articles that I’ve published. Over the past year or two, I’ve accumulated a few hundred followers--that is, Facebook friends--and, based upon the comments they leave, they tend to see the world the same way that I do. They’re left of center, by and large, and they believe fervently in health care reform.
There has been a growing fury about the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case, but much of that fury hangs upon an odd reading of the Court’s opinion. The Court, it is said, has given corporations all the rights of “persons.” It has elevated these artificial beings into entities “endowed by their Creator” (us) “with certain unalienable rights,” including the right to free speech.
Barack Obama is gunning for a confrontation with the Supreme Court, and Chief Justice John Roberts has signaled that he welcomes the fight. Last week, the chief justice described the president’s State of the Union condemnation of the Citizens United decision as “very troubling” and complained that the speech had “degenerated to a political pep rally.” Roberts was making an argument about etiquette--dissent was fine, he said, but Obama had somehow transgressed the boundaries of civilized discourse by delivering his attack to a captive audience.
