Legislation Without a Vote - A New Low in Congressional History

It looks like we can add Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY) to the list of people that are showing signs of mental duress in Washington. First there was her odd story during the Healthcare summit of call she received from some phantom constituent. According to Ms. Slaughter, this person had to resort to wearing her dead sister’s dentures because she had no health insurance and could not afford her own. About the only thing missing from that exchange was the image of her grasping at the air trying to catch the imaginary butterflies circling her head. Apparently Louise’s condition has worsened and she has slipped beyond eccentricity and is now living in her own little world; a world where the Congress has a whole new set of imaginary rules they can use to pass healthcare reform so her friend can stop wearing someone else’s teeth.

The Senate Parliamentarian has already ruled that a Bill that has not been signed into law cannot be subject to reconciliation and that places a difficult burden on House Democrats. They must accept the Senate Bill as written and pass it without modification so that the President can sign it before any reconciliation measure is possible to work out the differences between the House and the Senate versions. Of course the Senate crafted their own bill because there was no possible way the House bill could have passed the Senate. There is in fact, no reason to believe that the Senate will yield on anything the House wants once this thing has actually been signed into law. Herein lays the quandary. Certain House Democrats will not vote for the bill unless they have concrete assurances that their issues will be acted on in reconciliation and the Senate says they can offer no such assurances on a bill that has not been made law yet. Catch 22.

Now in another leap into the bizarre, Slaughter has suggested her own idea to move the Healthcare Bill forward; an idea that seems to appeal to her fellow dementia sufferer, Nancy Pelosi. Her thoughts are that since the House passed a bill and the Senate passed a bill, we’ve both passed a bill already. Let’s skip the vote and send this to the President since we both passed a bill! Well, the only problem with that idea is that they both passed different bills. Even the President’s odd-ball compromise presented just prior to the Healthcare summit was only a list of un-scored ideas that would modify the Senate bill and if any of those changes were incorporated into the Senate bill then, in fact, the Senate bill really hasn’t passed either….has it?

All jokes aside, this is a critically serious issue. To use the “Slaughter” plan, Congress would have to abandon every known rule of the legislative process and not only ignore the public rejection of this bill but circumvent the justifiable opposition posed by other members of Congress as well. The reason this bill has not passed on its own merit is that there is a bi-partisan rejection of it on a number of critical issues. To use Slaughter’s idea to move it out of the house would not only damage the efficacy of the Democratic Party as they face a difficult election year but would also raise serious questions about the legitimacy of the Federal government as legislation ceases to be legislation and wants becomes laws through the dictates of a minority group of radical ideologues.

The loss of legitimacy is a serious charge, but have any of the processes used in conjunction with this Congress and this President resembled anything we have ever seen in the past? Agency heads threatening Congress to pass legislation “or else”; threats of using reconciliation to pass bills that have not even been signed into law; the use of Presidential executive orders to seize an additional thirteen million acres of land to deny access to oil, gas and coal reserves and now, the Progressive wing of a single Party bypassing all of Congress to achieve a bullet point on their agenda?

True Democracies are never overthrown by violent means; they are consumed by malevolent forces from within. The apathy of an appeased electorate opens the door for the systematic encroachment on personal liberty under the guise of “providing for the good of the people”. The government can only provide a benefit if we agree to surrender certain rights in that area. What is the Healthcare bill really about? Well, Nancy Pelosi unwittingly admitted that the other day. In a speech she was giving about the “wondrous” gift they are about to give the American people she said that for the first time we will be able to address the health of the nation. Pelosi continued: this is more about “diet than diabetes”. Really? And how does the bill accomplish that lofty goal unless there will eventually be mandates controlling your diet?

Cass Sunstein, Obama’s regulatory Czar, would love nothing better that to see people “nudged” into a meat free diet. He’s even said in papers written earlier in his career that animals should be represented by attorneys. Well, with health mandates we can just “regulate” you away from those barbarous acts of eating poor defenseless animals and dispense with the need for animal lawyers altogether. Don’t forget the nuts and bolts of this plan are not described in the bill itself. They will be crafted later by the massive new agency and controlling board it will create; a controlling board appointed by Barack Obama and guided by the wisdom of Cass Sunstein.

Some may yell out “That is absurd! The United States government doesn’t have the right to tell me what I can eat!” Well, that’s true (for now) but they didn’t have the right to tell people they can’t smoke either. What they have seized the right to do, now that the Constitution is nothing but an obstacle to skirt, is tax something out of existence. One of the first acts of the Obama administration was to increase the sin tax on cigarettes more than 250%. Of course anti-smoking activists applauded the move with little consideration of how heavily the application of “sin” taxes depends on who is identifying the “sin”. Now that the likely targets for the new healthcare sin taxes will be hamburgers, fries and a cold soda, how do the supporters of cigarette taxes feel about delegating that amount of control to the government now? A little cheated maybe?

But wait, there’s more! Red meat has been accused of causing heart problems and cancers, so kiss your delicious steaks goodbye. Sugar? I’m sorry…diabetes. Salt? Well, New York is already working to ban that from restaurants because of the link to high blood pressure so that’s probably out too. Butter; cream; candy and that dreaded of all criminals…pizza! Life is about to become very bland indeed.

If you’re willing to foot the added expense of the “chubby-foods” sin tax you can still eat like its 1999 but the part we don’t know is if the new healthcare guidelines will impose insurance premium surcharges for people that don’t fit the healthcare board’s idea of physically fit. What’s your BMI? How much do you exercise? Are you engaged in risky behavior like skiing or skydiving? You know anything that can harm you is bad and therefore in dire need of behavioral modification.

That is just a dream though. This is the United States of America; the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave! The Federal government just doesn’t have that kind of power under the Constitution. But then again, what does the Constitution mean anymore if laws can be passed by ideological zealots that can get away with only pretending there was a legitimate vote? Sounds like Election Day in the old Soviet Union doesn’t it? One candidate scoring a landslide victory… that’s a perfect example of Progressive Democracy for you!

God help us now!

Paul

What Is Reconciliation and Why Are We Using It?

I guess the President still hasn’t explained his healthcare plan adequately because there continues to be massive opposition where it counts most; the opinion of the American people. The healthcare summit was supposed to garner support for the Healthcare Reform Bill but curiously, the American people still reject it by a margin of 2 to 1 with most saying that the President should scrap the bill and start over in a truly non-partisan and transparent process. Most polls show that using reconciliation to pass the current bill would be disastrous for Democrats and should that occur, the 2010 mid-term election would be a referendum on the public’s disenchantment with the underhanded processes used by Democrats to force legislation through not just around the opposition of Republicans but moderate Democrats as well.

Main Street America may not have studied political science at Harvard but they do know when something smells bad. Senator John McCain raised a good point at the healthcare summit and rather than answer that point, the President chose to remind McCain that the campaign was over and the election results were in. The point McCain brought up was that if this bill is so good, then why did Congressional leadership have to buy the votes of so many Democrats? With the Democrats holding a majority in the house and a filibuster proof majority in the Senate for all of 2009, any good bill would have passed easily without a single Republican vote. Truthfully, if it were a good bill, there are an awful lot of moderate Republicans that would have voted for it too. It didn’t pass because it is a lousy bill and everyone knows it.

Now that public rejection of the healthcare bill swept Republican Scott Brown into the Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, Progressive Democrats are once again planning to use reconciliation to pass the bill with a simple majority; thwarting the appropriate process that requires a sixty vote majority. On Tuesday, the President sent a perfunctory letter to Republican Congressional leaders stating that he planned to incorporate four Republican ideas into the healthcare bill to gain their support. Of course the President knew his offer would be rejected because the four ideas he said he would include would not change the offensive nature of the bill. Honestly, it was never his intention to gain Republican support; it was merely his intention to be able to say that he tried to at his next photo op.

Republicans remain opposed to the bill because it is an issue of fundamental values. How could a Republican support a bill that would in fact, endanger the Republic? Adding forty pages of low priority Republican ideas to a twenty-seven hundred page tax and spend debacle does not make it less of a debacle. Let’s face it, you can’t add forty pounds of sugar to a ton and a half of salt and call it candy. Truthfully, the talk of reconciliation is being blamed on Republican opposition to the legislation but is that really the issue? I’m sure with some arm twisting, threats of base closures and other funding tricks they could have convinced at least one Republican to vote for this mess. The truth is that if Scott Brown had not won the election they would probably have had to use reconciliation anyway. Even now, there are questions as to whether or not they will have the votes they need because of defections within their own party. Despite the rants of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, moderate Democrats still have to answer to their constituents and their constituents are telling them to vote no or else.

Harry Reid and Barrack Obama have both said that use of reconciliation to forward the Healthcare Bill was perfectly acceptable and that Republican had used this measure numerous times in the past. What Harry Reid didn’t tell you was that every time reconciliation was used by a Republican administration that there were vociferous cries of tyranny from the minority Party which happened to be the same Democrats that are now considering the measure appropriate and correct. What they also failed to mention was that reconciliation had only been used as intended by the act that formed it, The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 which can be read in text form at - http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/02C17B.txt .

So what is reconciliation? During the 1972 election campaign, President Nixon asked Congress for authority to cut Federal spending at his own discretion to remain under the proposed $250 billion ceiling for fiscal year 1973. Congress refused to grant such an open-ended grant of authority. Congress and the White House ultimately clashed sharply over President Nixon's aggressive impoundment of (refusal to spend) funds appropriated by Congress. In 1972, as a result of the battle between the Congress and the President, Congress created a Joint Study Committee on Budget Control, composed of members from the House and Senate appropriations and tax committees as well as two members from each Chamber. Included in the committee’s recommendations was a means of improving “the opportunity for the Congress to examine the budget from an overall point of view, together with a congressional system of deciding priorities.'' The report went on to state that it was "important to recognize that the budget deficit be no larger (or the surplus no smaller) than the Congress considers appropriate for economic or other reasons.''

In response to both the frustration generated by the fractured congressional budget process and the perceived encroachment of the executive branch into the budgetary turf of Congress, Congress passed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. The major purposes of this Act were to reassert the congressional role in budgeting, to add some centralizing influence to the Federal budget process, and to constrain the use of impoundments.

One of the most important developments to emerge from the 1974 Act has been reconciliation, a process that allows Congress to change existing laws to conform with the tax and spending levels established in a proposed budget. This developed into an important procedure for implementing the policy decisions and assumptions as enunciated in a budget resolution; a policy that was not envisioned when the Budget Act was written. Under the original design of the 1974 Budget Act, reconciliation had a fairly narrow purpose. It was expected to be used in conjunction with a second resolution, was to apply to a single fiscal year and be directed primarily at spending and revenue legislation acted on between the adoption of the first and second budget resolutions.

Regardless of the rants of Harry Reid, reconciliation has never before used by either Party to pass legislation that hasn’t already been presented to the President. It was meant to move important legislation beyond the roadblock of a reluctant President and the subservient members of his Party in Congress. This is clearly a violation of ethical behavior on the part of Reid, Pelosi and Obama to mutate a clearly defined budgetary process to enact unpopular legislation.

Again, the use of this legislative “trick” to move the bill forward is not being used to bypass the Republican Party. It is being used to bypass moderate Democrats that realize what this bill means and are as reluctant to vote for it as the Republicans are. Unfortunately for those moderates, the openly tyrannical antics of the Democratic leadership and Progressive Democrats will damage their prospects for reelection as well. The damage this legislation will bring cannot remain hidden once it is past and that is when those that refused to believe the warnings will be aghast at what has been done. It is nothing less than the creation of a government agency that will have all the authority it needs to unilaterally control ever aspect of healthcare in this country.

Paul