Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Democrats on Health Care: You Don't Need to Read the Bill!   [Mark Hemingway]

On day two of the Baucus hearings, a major dispute erupted in the Senate Finance Committee. The dispute was over an amendment allowing the committee to vote on the conceptual language of the bill rather than the actual legislative wording.

When working on a bill, the Senate Finance Committee tends to work in "conceptual language" or plain English. However, the committee also wants a complete cost analysis by the Congressional Budget Office be publicly available before a vote. However, the CBO director has said that a cost analysis of the bill based on the committee's conceptual language — rather than the actual legislative language — "does not constitute a comprehensive cost estimate" and that working with conceptual language was an "important caveat" that may not produce an accurate cost estimate. Republicans argued that the committee should take up the actual legislative language, given the historically unprecedented magnitude of the bill which will affect 17 percent of the economy in perpetuity.

Democrats are vociferously opposed to this for the simple reason that this would slow down the bill and give critics more to chew on. Senator Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) actually argued that having the exact legislative language didn't matter because "there's 5 percent of the American people that understand the legal language." That's right, a United States Senator argued that there was no reason to let the American people in on the Kabalistic workings of the Senate Finance Comittee because 95 percent of Americans wouldn't understand it anyway.

Then Conrad resorted to the time-honored argument employed whenever a Senator wishes to do something nonsensical: It's Senate tradition. He explained that he had once had lunch with the venerable and now deceased Sen. Lloyd Benstsen (D-Tex.) a former Senate Finance Committee chairman. At that lunch, Bensten apparently handed Conrad a stone tablet that read, "Thou shalt use conceptual language on the Finance Committee and place thy trust in overworked and underpaid twentysomething legislative assistants and committee staffers not to screw up the actual legislation too badly."

The Democratic opposition to working with the legislative language seemed to inflame the GOP members of the committee — particularly Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). "The [CBO] director didn't ask for plain language, he didn't ask for concepts," she told the committee. "He was being very specific." 

She also hammered the Democrats for their obvious political motives."We shouldn't be afraid of sunlight, we shouldn't be afraid of transparency, we shouldn't be afraid of accountability, We shouldn't be afraid of numbers and facts," Sen. Snowe said. "I don't know what's happening in two weeks that we have to put this on a legislative fast track." After a while, Sen. Snowe just began to sound like a broken record. "I truly don't understand the skepticism, I do not understand the reluctance ... If it takes two more weeks, it takes two more weeks ... Is there something happening in two weeks that we can not wait? ... I want to do our job and and I want to sit here and do it as long as it takes." If the Democrats want support from GOP moderates such as Snowe, putting expediency over basic transparency and caution hardly seems like the way to earn their support.

Needless to say, the Finance Committee passed the Baucus amendment allowing the committee to vote on the "conceptual language" of the Health Care bill. The vote was 13-10.

09/23 12:46 PMShare