McConnell is pushing his agenda so fast that I’m throwing my thoughts together here so that I can ask people with actual expertise if my fears are grounded. It could take me longer to research my questions sufficiently than it will for them to finish this atrocity.
If you have expertise in this area, please comment!
From what I have gathered, once they get any bill through the Senate via the reconciliation act, it goes to conference to reconcile the difference between the House and Senate versions of the bills. The bill is expected to be a “skinny repeal” bill which may do as little as repeal the individual mandate and the medical device tax.
McConnell seems to be arguing for this within his caucus by telling Senators that once they get it into conference, then they can improve it and make it into something workable.
The building blocks for the reasons this sounds disastrous to me are as follows:
- Senate and House rules dictate that nothing can be added to a bill in conference that wasn’t presented to either chamber’s conferees.
- To the best of my current, shaky understanding, this means that they’re generally restricted to items in the AHCA, which the House passed, and items in whatever bill gets through the Senate.
- New material can be introduced, but is subject to a point-of-order challenge.
- There are no requirements that I have found for the makeup of committees, and it seems to me from this document that the critical points are:
- No guideline on respective sizes of House and Senate contingents
- No guideline on partisan makeup of the contingents
- Conferees appointed not by vote, but directly by the Speaker and the Chair
- Once a 3/5 majority of each chamber has approved the changes, the resulting conference report is returned to the House and Senate for a vote to adopt it.
- At this point, it cannot be amended.
- Floor debate on the motion to adopt is limited to 10 hours, with no filibuster possible.
Putting these together, this is the scenario I fear McConnell is pursuing:
At the last possible moment, he introduces the “skinny repeal” text in an amendment which declares all previous text invalid. It is as narrowly defined as possible so that the Senators at the ideological extremes of the caucus are either willing to believe they could address their concerns in conference, or they can plausibly claim to their constituents that they believed it.
The bill goes to conference. The appointed conferees are all Republican, and are all clustered together ideologically. They construct the bill however they want it. They can add whatever they want, because they’ve excluded anyone who is likely to raise a point of order (i.e. Democrats). They can take their time coming up with ways, which they think will get past the parliamentarian, to buy off dubious members, as well as exerting additional pressure on them, until the votes are there.
The conference report is returned, and now there’s not even an option for Democrats to try to amend it, or for any Republicans who were not conferees to do so (Senators Murkowski and Collins are almost certain not to be part of this process). The Republicans have their 50 votes, and will call a vote as soon as the report has been publicly available for the mandatory minimum of 48 hours. No filibuster is possible, either, and floor debate is only 10 hours.
Is this as plausible as I’m afraid it is?
If so, those 10 key states need to be flooded with advertising and grassroots actions immediately, aimed at convincing their Senators that their constituents are aware of the strategy. Those Senators need to fully believe that no tweaks, no means of conferring something to be sold to the constituents as an advantage, no legislative sleight of spin will placate their state or save their seat in the next election if they play along.
A metaphor I’ve been using when referring to the promises Senator Rubio and Governor Scott make about ensuring that Florida’s Medicaid funding remains the same as other states which did expand Medicaid, and which could be developed into one such advertisement:
“The GOP is coming to hit everyone in the head with a baseball bat. But don’t worry. They were going to hit you a lot more, but we’ve negotiated for them to hit everyone the same number of times.”