In the first nice, decent thing the Republicans have done in living memory, they passed the Food Safety Bill even though they could have used an administrative error to kill it. All spending bills must originate in the House. We abide by this Constitutional requirement not by honoring its intent but by finding a way to make it technically true. So, for example, congressional leaders will take a House bill that isn’t going anywhere and then pass an amendment to delete everything in that bill and replace it with the content of some Senate bill. Now they have a bill that “originated in the House.” Congress passes it and we’re good. But some moron forgot that Senate-originated spending bills are like hermit crabs, and no one hollowed out a home for the Food Safety Bill.
Even though it passed in both houses of Congress, it was an invalid bill. So, the Dems attached a new version of the bill to the Omnibus Appropriations bill, but that was killed by threat of filibuster. So, it looked like we were going to lose a bill on food safety because of a combination of banal incompetence and relentless Republican exploitation of any and all weaknesses.
But then the Grinch’s heart grew ten-fold or something.
The Senate unexpectedly approved food safety legislation by voice vote Sunday evening, rescuing a bill that floated in limbo for weeks because of a clerical error…
…Democrats first attempted to attach the food safety bill to the two-and-a-half-month spending measure but Republicans balked because they wanted to keep that measure clean, according to Senate aides.
Republicans, however, later agreed to pass it by voice vote…
…The swift approval by unanimous consent caught some aides and lobbyists working on it by surprise. Sen. Tom Coburn, the outspoken conservative Republican from Oklahoma, had been blocking the legislation. He lifted his objection at the final moment.
I guess someone on their side figured out that exploiting a clerical error to kill a food safety bill was not going to poll too well. Still, I’m surprised the Republicans relented. It’s the first sign of weakness I’ve seen from them in a long, long time. But it was also the right thing to do.
Helluva thing when doing the right thing is a sign of weakness. But there it is.
Oh, you know, when you’re coming off an old enough to bleed, old enough to breed gambit, you have strength to spare.
I guess someone on their side figured out that exploiting a clerical error to kill a food safety bill was not going to poll too well.
This … makes no sense to me. None of the folks impacted by this bill will be up for re-election for another two years. There’s no way something like this will be an issue to vote against them. In fact, the folks who will care the most about this on the GOP side are the folks who would use it as a reason to vote against a Republican who voted for it (i.e. people whose business interests depend on a weak FDA). Even if there’s a food screw-up in the next 2 years the blame will fall squarely on the FDA and the president – this bill would fall down the memory hole for everyone except a few bloggers.
Looking at the original roll call vote for the bill from November, there were 15 Republicans voting YEA on this bill. Besides the usual suspect (Snowe, Collins, Brown) we also see:
Murkowski, Lisa (Alaska)
LeMieux, George (Florida)
Kirk, Mark (Illinois)
Lugar, Richard (Indiana)
Grassley, Charles (Iowa)
Vitter, David (Louisiana)
Johanns, Mike (Nebraska)
Gregg, Judd (New Hampshire)
Burr, Richard (NC)
Voinovich, George (Ohio)
Alexander, Lamar (Tennessee)
Enzi, Michael (Wyoming)
A number of those folks are from food producing states (Nebraska, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Florida) – which suggests that the folks from those states are getting a good deal with this bill and the senators involved didn’t want to risk losing something.
What it might be I’m not sure – but I will bet that in the compromise to get 73 YEA votes on this bill the food industries in those states got concessions on something that was bugging them. And glancing over the summary of the bill I would bet that one good candidate are the provisions of FDA oversight on imported foods. Another one particular to Vitter’s vote from Louisiana is the updated “Fish Products Hazards” guidelines.
I just refuse to believe that the Republicans think not passing this vote is a political problem for them UNLESS it pisses off some particular voting or fund-raising demographic if it doesn’t pass. And the relatively large number of Republicans from food-producing states suggests to me that some of the big food producers in those states want something that this bill is going to give them – and it’s something that the Republicans would have a hard time passing outside of this bill.
(There’s also the chance that a few of them just think this is good legislation that needs to be done. I’d be willing to credit Lugar, Voinovich and a few others on the list with that. But not Vitter – he got something out of this bill that he’s loathe to tell his folks back home that they can’t have.)
Well, the bill did pass, and it did have a bunch of GOP votes. So, to kill it involved a kind of unity that they may not have had.
“I guess someone on their side figured out that exploiting a clerical error to kill a food safety bill was not going to poll too well. Still, I’m surprised the Republicans relented. It’s the first sign of weakness I’ve seen from them in a long, long time. But it was also the right thing to do.”
Very happy they did it, but somehow I don’t think that was the reason. How did they suddenly become so reasonable? I suspect something far more twisted, though I have no idea what it was.
“I guess someone on their side figured out that exploiting a clerical error to kill a food safety bill was not going to poll too well.”
As opposed to abusing Senate rules in order to kill a bill providing health care to 9/11 responders? Honest question. Wherein lies the difference?