The unusually-tinted Minority Leader of the House, John Boehner (R-OH) has been to the floor repeatedly today to try to extract promises from the Democrats managing the health insurance reform bill that if the Stupak amendment is adopted, they'll work to ensure that the amendment's language survives as a part of the final conference report. To their credit, no one has given that pledge.
And their reasoning has been sound. The fact is that nobody can really guarantee what will come out of a conference with the Senate. And that's not to mention the futility of trying to strike deals with an opportunist like Boehner.
But does Boehner have a point in insisting that the floor managers, who are the chairs of the three committees with jurisdiction over the bill, and therefore will likely be the main conferees in the part of the House, can speak with some authority on what's likely to happen in conference, and could even commit if they wanted to to voting in support of the House's official position on the amendment? Sure.
Does that entitle him to such a commitment? Absolutely not.
What's more, Boehner's sputtering apoplepsy at their refusal to give it is either an act, or evidence of his total disconnection from the everyday realities of the legislative process. Actually, I'm betting on a little bit of both.
Boehner's complaint is similar to the one expressed in last night's Rules Committee meeting by the odious Virginia Foxx (R-NC), that Republican amendments adopted in various committee markups of H.R. 3200, the precursor to the bill on the floor today, disappeared from the bill when the three versions were merged into today's product. It's 100% true: things change as bills move from one stage of the process to the next. Happens all the time. And it's been the bane of legislators who thought they'd had a victory under their belt since, well, forever.
In fact, it's often what happens to those annoying Republican motions to recommit that sometimes pass when the Blue Dogs are freed to "vote their districts" (i.e., pretend they're kind of Republican). Rather than allow the actual Republicans to set them up for attacks by forcing difficult votes on those motions, Dems occasionally will just get out of the way, voting to agree to a particularly stupid motion to recommit, often with the knowledge that the language will ultimately be removed in conference, anyway.
So strong is the tradition of giving independence and flexibility to conferees, in fact, that even when the House goes out if its way to specially adopt motions instructing the conferees to take certain negotiating positions, those instructions are non-binding, and well known to be so. And public option activists who participated in the effort to get progressive House Members to commit to demanding the inclusion of the public option all the way through conference will doubtless recognize that they often encountered much of the same difficulty that Boehner's having, for much the same reason.
Annoying? Yes. Confusing? Sure. Frustrating? You bet. Susceptible to Rumsfeldian sets of repetitive rhetorical questions? Absolutely.
But also entirely routine, and common enough that for Boehner to express any real surprise is fairly ludicrous, not unlike his skin tone.
Just thought you might like to know.