By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Even if the House passes the Senate version of health care reform this weekend, there is still no guarantee that the bill will survive.
According to Politico’s Carrie Brown and Manu Raju, opponents of the bill have been plotting for months to “sentence it to a painful procedural death” should it ever manage to pass the House.
“Republican aides have been mining the Senate’s arcane parliamentary rules for an attack that aims at striking elements both broad and narrow from the bill, weakening the measure and ultimately defeating it,” they write. “Their goal is to force changes that leave Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) without 51 votes to pass it, or at the very least, that drive it back to the House for a second vote that drags out the process and saps Democratic resolve.”
Is this possible? Absolutely.
“One senior Republican aide said staff and senators believe that as much as 40 percent of the measure can be killed through procedural objections,” Brown and Raju report.
Republican Policy Committee Chairman John Thune of South Dakota and Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire have developed a strategy to strike major elements of the reconciliation bill, including changes to the special Medicaid deal for Nebraska and the carve-out for Florida senior citizens from Medicaid Advantage cuts. Their plan also targets seemingly minor provisions, including one that would fix language dealing with the employer mandate and the construction industry.
Even though every reconciliation bill ever proposed has passed, two-thirds of them faced procedural challenges. And these challenges can be tough because every line in the bill must adhere to complex rules or risk being struck by the parliamentarian. If so much as a comma is changed in the bill, it will need to return to the House for a second vote. Depending on what changes were made, passage in the House could be tough.
Opponents have at least two major tools available to stop the bill.
The first involves points of order, which means raising arguments such as how the bill doesn’t comply with the Byrd Rule, which prohibits lawmakers from including anything “extraneous” in the bill. The bill must meet six different tests, such as requiring every element to affect the budget in a significant way. Proponents would need 60 votes to waive a point of order, which they don’t have.
The second tool is the amendment process. After 20 hours of debate, opponents can offer as many amendments as possible, which they plan to do, and on “politically treacherous issues” that will force Democrats to have to cast controversial votes just months before the election. Any one of these amendments could effectively “kill the bill.”
But before the bill gets to this stage, opponents are hoping to stop its passage in the House by convincing nervous Democrats who are counting on a fix that there is a very good chance the fixes won’t be made.
“Our initial goal is to stop the bill in the House,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). “Part of convincing House members to vote for the Senate bill is that it can be fixed by reconciliation, and I think that is a highly questionable proposition.”
If they can scare enough “fence-sitters” into voting no, and the bill fails to pass in the House, comprehensive health care reform will finally die.
But if it does pass, many more hurdles lay ahead.
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