Former House Rules Committee chairman Rep. David Dreier, R-CA, this afternoon called for “a clean up-or-down vote that will allow the American people to see who is supporting this Senate [health care reform] bill and who is not supporting it.”
Dreir, who in 2007 became the Ranking GOP member of the panel now chaired by Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-NY, rejected a suggestion from a reporter during a Capitol Hill news conference that voters don’t care about procedural issues like the controversial “Slaughter Solution” rule that would “deem” the Senate health care bill to have been passed by the House even though no recorded vote on it is taken, as required by the Constitution.
“Up until June 26 of last year, I would have agreed with you but on June 26 when I was sitting upstairs and Jim McGovern was reading the motion for the special rule to be required to bring to the floor the cap and trade bill, at that moment I had this 300-page amendment dropped in my lap, as did my other colleagues on the rules committee, we finally got the American people to focus on process,” Dreier said.
He was referring to a controversial last-minute 300-page amendment to the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House of Representatives last year. The amendment was adopted despite the fact the text was only completed at midnight before the day of the vote, so members had little time to review the massive collection of changes to the bill that had been reported to the floor for a final vote.
“Let me say it, process is substance. What came from that day? John Boehner stood up and went through the 300 pages and the mantra ‘read the bill’ was echoing all across the country,” Dreier continued. “So we still have people saying that to resort to these kinds of tactics to deal with this is just plain wrong.”
Dreier said “the notion of self-enacting the Senate bill in a rule would avoid accountability.” And he challenged reporters to consider that “if it’s done that way, how much debate is there on the bill itself? Not one moment of debate on it. The only debate is on the rule itself, but no debate on the bill.”
Democrats are countering GOP criticism of the Slaughter Solution by claiming similar “self-enacting” rules have been used hundreds of times in the recent past, including on whether to raise the national debt ceiling. Republicans say, however, that none of the previous occasions were for legislation whose scope was anything near that of the Obamacare, which would effectively nationalize one-sixth of the private economy.
Dreier said the national debt votes were on an issue “that is regularly addressed and this [health care reform] there has never been anything like this before.”
Karen Tumulty of Time’s Swampland blog offers some interesting analyses on the issue of whether self-executing rules should be termed the “Slaughter Solution” or the “Dreier Doctrine.”
