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Rules Committee meeting descends into chaos
By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
03/20/10 12:42 PM EDT
At the House Rules Committee meeting, Democrats desperate to pass their national health care plan are running into the barrier of basic civics. Here is the problem: The Senate has passed its HCR bill. If the House passes the same bill, it goes on to the president; once he signs it, the bill becomes law. But House Democrats, when they vote for the Senate bill using the "Deem & Pass" dodge, also want to simultaneously pass a package of amendments to the law. Except HCR will not, at that point, be law. It will only become law when the president signs it. Congress can amend the law -- it does so all the time -- but can it amend something that isn't law?
Which is where Democrats are tripping up. Passage of their HCR proposal should be very simple: Senate passes it, House passes it, president signs it. But House Democrats are terrified of voting for the unpopular bill, so they hope to pass it by "Deem & Pass," in which they will vote, not for the bill, but for a rule that both deems the Senate bill to have passed and, in the same vote, passes the package of amendments. So House Democrats will have two fig leaves: 1) they didn't vote directly for the Senate bill, and 2) they voted to simultaneously amend -- to "fix" -- the Senate bill.
The problem is the sequence. Can the House vote to amend something that isn't the law, as the Senate bill will not be law before the president's signature? The Rules Committee meeting turned into mass confusion when Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman said, "We're not going to 'deem' the bill passed. We're going to pass the Senate bill…I would be against the idea of 'deeming' something -- we either pass it or we don't."
To Republican ears, that sounded as if Waxman was speaking out in support of a direct vote on the Senate plan. "I hope we're making news here," said Republican Rep. Joe Barton. If so, Barton added, "Praise the Lord!" Other Democrats jumped in to say that no, there would not be a direct vote on the Senate bill.
Barton then asked whether there would be some period of time between House passage of the Senate bill and House passage of the HCR amendments. During that period of time, the president would sign the Senate HCR bill into law. For the House to amend the HCR law, Barton said, it has to be law, which means the president has to have signed it. "If he doesn't, it ain't a law," Barton said.
Democratic Rep. Sander Levin jumped in. "We're going to be amending the law," he claimed. Waxman added, "We change current law, and the current law will be the Senate bill once it's voted on in the House."
But it won't be law until the president signs it. Obviously, Democrats are performing such strange contortions because many of their members are scared of voting for a bill that will likely mean defeat for them in November. But their attempts to avoid responsibility have created some very basic problems.
UPDATE 1: Faced with nervousness within their ranks, Democratic leaders have decided to drop the "Deem & Pass" strategy. That satisfies one Republican demand, which was that House should have a standalone vote on the Senate national health care bill.
But Democrats are apparently determined to vote for their package of amendments to the Senate bill before they vote for the bill itself. (They remain terrified of voting for the deal-laden Senate measure without having already voted to "fix" it.) That plan still runs afoul of the second Republican objection, which is that the House cannot vote to amend a law that isn't a law. The Senate national health care bill can only become law after it is passed by the House and signed by the president, and without the president's signature, it isn't law. Republicans argue that the House cannot amend a law that isn't yet law.
During a break in the proceedings, Ranking Republican member Rep. David Dreier told me the Democrats' decision to hold a standalone vote on the Senate bill is a "positive" one, but he cannot predict what comes next. "This is clearly a work in progress," he said. "This thing right now is very, very fluid, so I don't know exactly what they're going to plan to do now."
Still, Republicans remain opposed to amending the Senate bill before it becomes law. "I'm very, very concerned, but I don't want to anticipate what they're going to do or not do," Dreier said. "The one thing that has happened is that the American people have gotten the message that process is substance. The fact that they have spoken so loudly and so enthusiastically is a positive thing, and that's what has led to this."
Finally, Dreier said he is also focused on the question of how much time the Rules Committee will allot for the final health care debate. Republicans have feared that it might be as little as one hour, but that, like everything else at the moment, is up in the air.
UPDATE 2: I just talked with a Republican rules expert, and it appears that there is nothing in the rules of the House that will prevent Democrats from scheduling the vote for the amendments package before the vote on the Senate bill itself -- that is, voting to amend the law before it becomes law.
"As a technical matter of the rules of the House, you can pass individual bills in any order you want," says the expert. The expert said Republican Rep. Joe Barton, who argued that the House could not amend the Senate bill before it became law, was making an "integrity-based" argument based on what should be done. "But as a strict construction matter of the House rules, there's no bar" to doing what the Democrats intend to do, the expert said.
"To quote Mr. Hastings," he concluded, "they can make it up as they go along."
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