Health Care Rules

Republicans spent the weekend blasting Democrats over the "Slaughter Solution", as rumors persisted that Democrats might try to use an obscure procedural maneuver to push a pair of health care bills through the House in coming days.

At issue are the resolutions from the Rules Committee that set the parameters for debate in the House on legislation.  In this case, the battle is over what's known inside the Capitol as a "self-executing rule".

Republicans say the Democratic plan to use such a rule to automatically bring about approval of a Senate-passed health care bill is outrageous, an abuse of the rules and unprecedented.

As usual in the poltical battles here in Congress, there's a bit of truth and a bit of hyperbole in those arguments, so let's review some of the basics.

Self-executing rules are nothing new, but how they work is probably confusing to most people outside of the Capitol.  Basically, a self-executing rule automatically makes changes to an underlying bill without separate debate or votes, often sparing the party in charge a difficult vote.

The practice of self-executing rules evidently began in the 1970s and have been used widely by both parties over the last thirty years.

For example, self-executing rules made up 22 percent of all rules for floor debate in the 103rd Congress in 1993-1994, according to Donald Wolfensberger, who was GOP Chief of Staff for the Rules Committee when Republicans ran the House after their 1994 election victory.

Wolfensberger wrote a few years ago that while Republicans had objected loudly to self-executing rules, they used them any way, as self-executing rules made up 25 percent of all rules in 1995-96 and 35 percent in 1997-98.  They hit a high point of 37 percent in 2003-04.

Democrats of course haven't given up on them since taking back the House, as a self-executing rule was used earlier this year to maneuver around a direct vote on a measure raising the nation's debt limit, while allowing a vote on Pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) legislation that was attached to the debt limit bill.

So back to the health care matter.  While both parties have used these arcane type rules for floor debate, it has been mainly to make changes in the text of legislation, not to approve a full bill.

I spent a good chunk of the weekend sifting through Rules Committee resolutions to see if I could find examples where full bills have been moved through the U.S. House using a self-executing provision.  That answer is yes.

In April of 2006, the Republican controlled House acted on legislation dealing with lobbying and ethics reforms.  The rule (H. Res 783) says that after the underlying bill was approved, the House Clerk was authorized to "add the text of H.R. 513", which was a bill dealing with campaign finance reforms.

In other words, that bill was not voted on that day, but it was added - because of the self-executing rule - to the underlying lobbying/ethics reform bill.  (H.R. 513 had been approved by the House earlier that month.)

I found a couple of examples like that over the past ten years, but not really anything like what has been talked about with the health care bill, where approving the rule governing debate on health reform would then automatically result in approval of the Senate passed health bill.

We'll see if that's what Democrats decide to do.  If so, they will certainly get an earful this week about whether or not they are abusing the process and just trying to jam a health bill through the Congress, no matter the opposition.

Republicans spent the weekend blasting Democrats over the "Slaughter Solution", as rumors persisted that Democrats might try to use an obscure procedural maneuver to push a pair of health care bills through the House in coming days. At issue are the resolutions from the Rules Committee that set the parameters ...