Slaughtered

I honestly don't know if Obamacare will pass the House, my heart says no but my head says yes, or at least maybe...who knows. I do have a preference though, if it should pass I hope that Pelosi and the Democrats have to resort to the so called Slaughter Plan to get it through.

If you don't know what the Slaughter Plan is, it is a parliamentary trick as was explained in the WSJ yesterday:

So at the Speaker's command, New York Democrat Louise Slaughter, who chairs the House Rules Committee, may insert what's known as a "self-executing rule," also known as a "hereby rule." Under this amazing procedural ruse, the House would then vote only once on the reconciliation corrections, but not on the underlying Senate bill. If those reconciliation corrections pass, the self-executing rule would say that the Senate bill is presumptively approved by the House—even without a formal up-or-down vote on the actual words of the Senate bill.

Democrats would thus send the Senate bill to President Obama for his signature even as they claimed to oppose the same Senate bill. They would be declaring themselves to be for and against the Senate bill in the same vote....

The reason I hope that this is the route they take is that it will not only expose the shenanigans being played it will add to the illegitimacy of the bill.

I already believe that portions of the bill are unconstitutional, particularly the individual mandate portion, which forces all Americans to carry insurance or be fined. But the idea that the very process that made it a law could be challenged would be even more damning.

While everyone is arguing over the particulars, it may very well be that it passes only to be declared completely void by the Supreme Court. Again from the WSJ the relevant Constitutional challenge would be in regards to this:

This two-votes-in-one gambit is a brazen affront to the plain language of the Constitution, which is intended to require democratic accountability. Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution says that in order for a "Bill" to "become a Law," it "shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate." This is why the House and Senate typically have a conference committee to work out differences in what each body passes. While sometimes one house cedes entirely to another, the expectation is that its Members must re-vote on the exact language of the other body's bill.

Since the House will not be voting on the exact language of the Senate Bill, except as a "rule" which will in affect be changing the Senates bill, I don't know how a reasonable person could say that this meets constitutional mustard. Of course I've been both wrong and disappointed before.

The irony of course is that the Senate will then have no reason or motivation to change the bill once the House votes to accept the Senate's already passed bill. It's their bill after all and at that point it will be law. The Senate Parliamentarian has already ruled that the Senate can not change (reconcile) the bill until it becomes a signed law so all the Pelosi crew will be doing is making the Senate Bill the law which Obama will sign without any leverage to get all their changes enacted in the Senate.

If somehow Pelosi pulls this off, it is possible that they could have their celebration on the House Floor followed by a signing ceremony in the Rose Garden and the whole shebang only to get slaughtered in November. But the true justice would be to have the whole thing thrown out by the Supreme Court.

Now wouldn't that be an "HISTORIC" achievement.

Via-Jer


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