Congressional procedure is painfully opaque. It’s difficult for me to determine Senate procedure on a conference committee report and that is making it hard for me to predict what is going to happen next on the stimulus bill. So, let me lay out what I know and also what I’m not sure about.
The House passed their stimulus bill a couple of weeks ago. It was a good bill and would have made a fine final product. It cost about $820 billion. The Senate has made numerous amendments to the House bill. Some of those amendments were good, like adding a lot of money for the National Institute of Health. Others were not so good, like stripping out a lot of education spending. In the end, however, the bills will both wind up costing around $820 billion. The big difference is that the Senate version includes $70 billion to address the Alternative Minimum Tax issue. So, the Senate version has roughly $70 billion more in tax cuts and roughly $70 billion less in direct stimulative spending. I think almost all economists would agree that the House version is better, but neither of them will become law.
What happens now is that the House and Senate will elect conferees who will meet together in a conference committee. They will work together to make one piece of legislation that both houses can support. And then those bills will go back to each house for a final vote.
We know that the House has the votes to pass anything. But the Senate usually requires 60 votes. The deal that was struck in the Senate tonight includes Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and, Arlen Specter. But those votes could evaporate if the conference committee restores a lot of the funding that was cut. The question is, how aggressive can the Democrats be in the conference (which they control) without blowing up the deal in the Senate?
Now, read this, and tell me what you make of it…
Once a bill has been passed by a conference committee, it goes directly to the floor of both houses for a vote, and is not open to further amendment. In the first House to consider the conference, a Member may move to recommit the bill to the conference committee. But once the first House has passed the conference report, the conference committee is dissolved, and the second House to act can no longer recommit the bill to conference.
Conference reports are privileged. And in the Senate, a motion to proceed to a conference report is not debatable, although Senators can generally filibuster the conference report itself. The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 limits debate on conference reports on budget reconciliation bills to 10 hours in the Senate, so Senators cannot filibuster those conference reports.
Filibusters are poorly understood. The simplest way to think about filibusters is that the Senate operates by the principle of unanimous consent. If even one member of the Senate objects to a motion, then there is no unanimous consent and the Senate must move to proceed despite the lack of unanimous consent. It requires sixty votes to proceed when unanimous consent is lacking. That is all a filibuster is. It is a situation where at least 41 members refuse to override the dissent of a single member.
When the Majority Leader wants to have a vote on a bill, he must first ask for consent to proceed to the bill. If that is denied then a filibuster has occurred. The Republicans can block almost anything with this procedure but they can’t block consideration of a conference report. That would suggest that passing the conference report in the Senate would require a mere fifty votes, and not the sixty needed to pass the bill before it went to conference.
Yet, the above source says ‘Senators can generally filibuster the conference report itself.’ I’m not sure what that means. Once the bill is under consideration, it only requires a majority to pass. If the Republicans cannot block consideration of the bill, it’s over. The Democrats have 58 votes (soon to be 59) and they can only be defeated if they need 60 votes. If anyone can clear this up for me, I would appreciate it.
I think the Dems can pass their conference report with whatever they want once the originating bill passes with 60 votes in the Senate. Am I wrong?
I am going out on a limb on this. I don’t normally post about things I don’t understand. But let me spell this out a little more so I can be clear about my confusion.
The old filibuster would happen when a senator, or a group of senators, would exercise their right to talk for as long as they want. Basically, a Senator cannot be made to shut up unless one of two things happen. If sixty (used to be sixty-seven) senators vote to make a senator shut up then he has to shut up. But most bills are debated under a unanimous consent agreement where the amount of time to debate has already been agreed to. Once there is unanimous consent that, say, each side has three hours of debating time, then senators are restricted to that time allotment.
So, it isn’t normally possible anymore to stall the senate by just talking and talking and talking. Of course, it is possible to do that in the absence of a unanimous consent agreement.
But a motion to proceed to a conference report is not debatable. What I think this means is that there is no need for a unanimous consent agreement.
Now, once the bill is brought up for consideration it only takes 50 to pass the bill. But it could be possible, in the absence of a unanimous consent agreement, for the Republicans to carry out an old school filibuster by refusing to stop talking. That, I think, is that only way they could filibuster the conference report bill.
Was reading about the budget reconciliation process here.
Yet, I have no way of knowing if Harry Reid introduced H.R.1 as a budget reconciliation measure or whether he can still use those rules to prevent a filibuster.
In 1993, Bill Clinton’s economic plan was introduced and passed using these filibuster-proof reconciliation rules. That’s also how Bush passed his three tax cuts.
If Harry Reid did not foresee that this bill would also need to pass via filibuster-proof reconciliation, he really needs to get a new job. And, if that’s the case he needs to tell Obama that he f’d up and they’ll reintroduce the bill the correct way, so that Susan Collins can’t wipe out $100 billion in necessary stimulus all by herself.
That said, I have to admire the unity of the GOP and do wish that our caucus was as united in opposition back when we had 44 Senators. Instead we had doormats like Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Landrieu and others to keep us from stopping anything.
Landrieu isn’t much of a politician.
Listening to the Republicans trash unemployment, food stamps and poor folks in general, she has a ready-made audience for a Democratic revolution in Louisiana. She’s just won re-election. There’s no reason for her to run scared every time the Republicans blink at her.
Frankly, I don’t understand the Democrats in Ohio, Indiana and Florida either. (Florida is the epitome of inept politics.) There are so many folks in those states who were demonstrably hurt last night by the GOP, and the Democrats aren’t using it. Perhaps they are waiting for the vote Monday. But people’s memories are short, and the time to let them know that they could have had more unemployment benefits, more COBRA months, more jobs for women (health care and education) is now!
I don’t know about the other states you mention, but here, too many are still slurping the Kool-Aid.
question??? how much was cut from education???????
I think the Dems can pass their conference report with whatever they want once the originating bill passes with 60 votes in the Senate. Am I wrong?
What does it matter? Ben Nelson and the other centrist Dems helped kill the bill with tax cuts. Having 58 seats has turned out to be meaningless with results like this.
At OpenLeft, some people have left comments indicating that – regardless of the general rules on filibusters – the stimulus bill ultimately would require 60 votes, because it increases the debt.
I hope that someone can eventually provide some authoritative answers about all of the procedures, because none make much sense to me.
Setting aside this bill, it seems odd to me that the Senate can send a bill to committee with the bare 60 votes, then allow the conference to control the final bill, only to require 51 votes afterwards. That would seem to make it all too simple to play games with the conference process.
Yeah, I’m trying to nail that down.
Kagro X, who is our best source on these things, thinks the GOP can raise a point of order based on the budget and that it will take 60 to overcome it. That’s not a filibuster but it has the exact same effect. But we have to verify this, which is proving a pain in the ass.
the stimulus bill ultimately would require 60 votes, because it increases the debt.
I guess that explains the 60 votes. Good grief. We are doomed if we have to keep kissing idiot Republican asses.
Republican legislators have no business of any kind altering or changing so much as one word in the Stimulus Package. It’s been eight long yeas of neglect, abuse, and mismanagement, they really need to sit down, STFU, and pass the Stimulus Package, as is.
If they had anything to say, where the hell have they been for the past eight years? Now their champions of America, and they’ll straighten it all out? Bullshit!
They need to stop their ridiculous posturing a strutting. There are times when a well aimed boot in the ass can really accomplish something.
Did you see Coburn all self-righteous about a trillion in debt being passed to our kids? Where was this clown the last eight years? The hypocrisy of the Republican party is truly fucking astonishing.
Pocket a few trillion then grab your chest when a trillion might go to stop a depression. They do not care about the country only about soundbites and escaping blame for wrecking our country.
Coburn will not be homeless either way so fuck everybody else.
This whole thing is confusing. I guess when bush’s taxcuts went through so many demorats voted with him these points were moot.
And here’s our answer.