Malarkey From The Senate On the Health Bill
Posted on Mon Feb 01, 2010 at 04:11:22 PM EST
Tags: (all tags)
Greg Sargent swallows some utter BS from Senate aides:
Senate leadership aides have identified what they see as a key roadblock to passing a fix to their bill via reconciliation — and parliamentarians in the Senate and House are hard at work trying to identify a solution, aides say. [. . .] “How do you fix a bill that hasn’t been passed yet?” one senior Senate aide asks me, stressing that reconciliation is different than the amendment process, which obviously does allow for bills to be fixed before passage. “That’s the fundamental problem.” “This is a whole bill that would amend another bill that hasn’t become law,” the aide adds. “How do we do reconciliation before the House passes the Senate bill?”
This is dishonest BS. How do you do it? Ask yourself how you would do it if the House passed the bill. That's how you do it. You pass a bill that amends the Stand Alone Senate bill, present it to the House, which then passes both bills. Then the President signs the original bill and immediately after signs the reconciliation fix. This is not rocket science. None of the bills are law UNTIL the President signs them. Hard to understand why Sargent is swallowing this nonsense. Kagro, more nicely than me, has a similar reaction. In other words, maybe there is something in the reconciliation rules that are troubling, but the nonsense Sargent is allowing the Senate to sell ain't it.
Speaking for me only
| < The Wine Track | Monday Afternoon and Evening Open Thread > |