Rich Lowry convinces me that it is time for another civics lesson. In order for a bill to become a law, both the House of Representatives and the Senate have to vote affirmatively for the bill, and both versions have to have identical language. In other words, there is really only one version of the bill, although there are two separate votes. It’s relatively easy to get the House and Senate to agree on identical language if you are naming a post office, but it’s much harder if you are trying to make up a farm bill or overhaul the nation’s immigration policy. But there is a process that facilitates compromise. It’s called a conference committee.
Basically, what a conference committee does is take members from both parties in both houses of Congress and it puts them in a room and has them vote on what will or will not be in the final version of the bill. The majority gets an extra member or two, so the way Congress is split now, the House delegation of conferees would have more Republicans and the Senate delegation would have more Democrats. Pretty much all complex legislation is crafted this way, because the alternative is for one chamber of Congress to give up on its own legislation entirely and just pass the other chambers’ work.
Now, the National Review editorial board is arguing that the House Republicans should just say ‘no’ to having a conference committee on immigration legislation. This can be done in three ways. The first way is to simply fail to pass any immigration-related legislation in the House. No legislation to reconcile means no conference committee. The second way is to pass legislation related to immigration (just to make a point, I guess) but to make no effort to go to conference and just let it die a quiet death. The third way is to pass legislation and call for a vote to approve the assignment of certain members to serve on the conference committee, but then vote down the motion.
To understand this, you need to know that the Senate has already passed a comprehensive bill (PDF) with numerous chapters and titles. This is what the National Review refers to derisively as the “Gang of Eight” bill. It actually had 18 Republican supporters.
The House Republicans have so far rejected/failed to come up with a strategy to pass a comprehensive bill. They want to have a bunch of discreet bills that deal with small areas of immigration policy. It doesn’t really matter which way they do it, because any immigration legislation will eventually have to be paired with what the Senate has produced. The problem for opponents of immigration reform is that there are probably enough Republicans in the House who want to pass reform that, joining with nearly all of the Democratic caucus, they have the votes to make a deal with the Senate and give the president a giant political victory. If the House passes anything germane to immigration, it can then appoint conferees to reconcile it with the Senate bill. The National Review fears that this would allow something to actually become law.
So, this is what they advise that Speaker Boehner do:
Incremental fixes to the immigration system make sense on the merits, and House Republicans understandably want to show that they favor their own set of reforms rather than oppose anything and everything. But incremental bills are destructive if their ultimate purpose is to get to a conference committee that would bless a version of the Gang of Eight bill. House leadership aides pooh-pooh the possibility of a conference committee. Well, then, there is a simple way to allay our fears and those of other opponents of the Gang of Eight — for Speaker Boehner to make a blood-oath commitment to oppose any conference committee…
…It is relatively easy. All he has to do is say, “No.” As in, “No, we won’t pass anything like the Gang of Eight bill. No, we won’t have a conference with the Senate over it. If the Senate wants to pass our reforms, wonderful. Otherwise, we will see you after the midterm elections.”
I can’t immerse myself in Republican rage-thought, so I don’t know exactly what Lowry means when he writes that Republican leadership “pooh-pooh the possibility of a conference committee.” There really is no point in drafting legislation if you won’t take it to a conference committee. I assume Lowry is using shorthand to argue that the anti-imigration faction would get rolled in a conference committee, which is quite possibly true.
This is always a possibility when you enforce an informal rule that no vote will be held if the majority of the majority doesn’t support it. So, what Lowry and the National Review are really arguing is that the House should not risk passing any immigration legislation at all. They should abandon their incremental approach. And, failing that, the Speaker should swear on his life that he won’t allow anything to become law.
Yet, somehow, he’s supposed to do this without admitting that he’s doing it.
