The Lies and Reconciliation Commission
Marty Kaplan
HuffPost
If Democrats decide to use the procedural move that Congress calls "reconciliation" to pass health care reform, get ready for a war of words. It will be won not by the biggest guns, but the biggest mouths. What's true won't matter; what's loudest, what's catchiest, will. That's democracy in the age of newsertainment.
Start with the fact that few people know what reconciliation is. It sounds like something from family law, or how Nelson Mandela got South Africans to put apartheid behind them. Politicians love a blank slate; it's a great opportunity to define - that is, poison -- the debate. Hello, death panels.
The reason that reconciliation has come up now is the prior war over filibusters, supermajorities and cloture. (I didn't say this would be simple.) Until 1975, a majority of the Senate, 51 votes, was what you needed to pass. Only two situations required more: votes of two-thirds specified in the Constitution (like ratifying treaties), and votes that the Senate's internal rules - which senators can make and change as they want - peg to a number more than 51.
For years, one of those rules - Rule 22 -- said that Senators can speak as long as they want, and sometimes talk a bill to death (filibuster), and that the only way to close down a filibuster (cloture) was to round up 67 votes, which was really, really hard. In the 1960s, the filibuster was used to block civil rights legislation. In the 1970s, Alabama Republican Senator Jim Allen used it to deep-six whatever he didn't like -- a federal consumer protection agency, a Legal Services Corporation, electoral college reform.
(Continued here.)
HuffPost
If Democrats decide to use the procedural move that Congress calls "reconciliation" to pass health care reform, get ready for a war of words. It will be won not by the biggest guns, but the biggest mouths. What's true won't matter; what's loudest, what's catchiest, will. That's democracy in the age of newsertainment.
Start with the fact that few people know what reconciliation is. It sounds like something from family law, or how Nelson Mandela got South Africans to put apartheid behind them. Politicians love a blank slate; it's a great opportunity to define - that is, poison -- the debate. Hello, death panels.
The reason that reconciliation has come up now is the prior war over filibusters, supermajorities and cloture. (I didn't say this would be simple.) Until 1975, a majority of the Senate, 51 votes, was what you needed to pass. Only two situations required more: votes of two-thirds specified in the Constitution (like ratifying treaties), and votes that the Senate's internal rules - which senators can make and change as they want - peg to a number more than 51.
For years, one of those rules - Rule 22 -- said that Senators can speak as long as they want, and sometimes talk a bill to death (filibuster), and that the only way to close down a filibuster (cloture) was to round up 67 votes, which was really, really hard. In the 1960s, the filibuster was used to block civil rights legislation. In the 1970s, Alabama Republican Senator Jim Allen used it to deep-six whatever he didn't like -- a federal consumer protection agency, a Legal Services Corporation, electoral college reform.
(Continued here.)
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