The hot procedural news out of the Hill yesterday was the prospect of "ping ponging" the health insurance reform bill to passage.
What's that?
There is increased chatter on Capitol Hill about a possible "ping-ponging" of the Senate health care bill: that chamber would pass its health care bill, send it to the House and the House would be asked to pass it with no changes and send it directly to the president.
Sounds exciting! And esoteric.
"I've started hearing about it in the last week or so," said Jim Kessler, head of the group Third Way. Kessler, a former senior aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), is working closely on health care negotiations and said he's heard talk of the ping-pong plan coming from the Hill.
"You would need pre-conference negotiations. That pre-conference negotiation would be what ends up in the manager's amendment," he said. "Essentially, the manager's amendment becomes the new conference."
But if you're starting to feel lost in the procedural arcana, remember this: "ping ponging" also has another, simpler name. It's called "passing the same damn bill in both houses."
We've talked about ping ponging before. But what you need to know about it to understand it is just this: there's only a need for a conference between the houses if there's a difference between the versions of the bill the two houses pass. If they both agree to the same version, there's nothing to go to conference about. Both houses have agreed to the same bill, and it can be cleared for the president. The end.
Every bill can potentially move this way. And many non-controversial bills and resolutions do. Though conference is how many of the big, important bills get settled, every time a bill is passed and sent to the other house for consideration, it's essentially an invitation to ping pong it. Legislators being who they are, though, the invitation is rarely accepted. More often, a competing bill will be taken up, or amendments will be made to the one sent over from the other body. And even after that happens, the other house is still offered a chance to go along with the second house's version instead. It's only when each house insists on its own position rather than adopt the version passed by the other that a conference becomes necessary.
The problem with ping ponging, though, is that it requires one house or the other to pass on its prerogative to continue to shape the legislative process. Tactical considerations may be such that it becomes advantageous to give up that right, but it's not an easy thing to do. And the reality of things is that it's usually the House that's asked to give up, typically on the premise that the Senate's makeup renders it immovable on the issues (most often thanks to the filibuster, but in which just plain ego also can play a large part). The Senate's bill, the House is told, is "the best deal they can get," and the proposition is that it's this or nothing.
That's a position all too familiar for the House, and especially for House progressives (see also: FISA). Their bargaining position was based on the proposition that they could line up the votes to force the House to insist on their position, and that there'd at least be a fight in conference to see whether the Senate would throw itself on the tracks to insist on its own position, or relent to its partner for once.
But that's rarely the way things work out. The differences in internal procedure most often make it unfeasible, if not impossible, for the Senate to move first. And as we know, the Senate moves slowly and contentiously when it does at last decide to move. So it's almost always the case that by the time the end of the Senate process is in sight, the pressures of the calendar combined with the Senate's own exhaustion with its process leads them to insist that upper chamber's bill is essentially the last possible product. Take it or leave it. The Senate has the vapors, and simply cannot go on! (And if you make us, someone just might filibuster again, and you don't want that on your conscience, do you?)
There's a hard bit of reality in that, of course. Because even once the Senate does finally finish its bill -- which means it gets past the threat, or multiple threats, of filibuster -- the whole thing can start all over again when the conference report comes back to the Senate for final clearance. Yes, a conference report is subject to filibuster. That's part of the leverage the Senate has over a weary and waiting House. Take what we give you, or you'll have to stay in session and pass another 650 suspension bills, waiting for us to break the filibusters of the motion to agree to the request for a conference, the motion to appoint conferees, and then of the conference report itself.
So yes, ping ponging is a short-cut to finishing the bill quickly and with fewer contentious votes. But it also requires ceding control of the process, once again, to the Senate, on a bill where House progressives had made some considerable strides in leaving their own imprint.