Good

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by publius

House Democrats seem to be holding firm.  From The Hill:

House Democrats on Tuesday said they are prepared to
negotiate past Presidents Day rather than cave to GOP Senate centrists on the
details of the economic stimulus package.

Bucking warnings that the delicate Senate compromise passed
Tuesday cannot be altered, leading House Democrats said it was not the House’s
job to bend to the will of the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to pass
difficult legislation.

Have I mentioned that Pelosi rocks?  (And Hoyer too).

(It's also worth remembering that 61-37 is a pretty decisive margin.  It's only "close" when viewed through the lens of the Senate's anti-majoritarian procedural rules.)

30 thoughts on “Good”

  1. It depends if you think “no stimulus” is better than “watered-down” stimulus. I’m open to being convinced in either direction, but I lean toward “watered-down” being worse.
    In this case, I think the House can afford to pay hardball, because the last thing the GOP wants right now is to be viewed as having killed the stimulus. What they’re aiming for is the bill passing over their objections, so that they can fall back on the “we opposed it” line if it doesn’t work.
    If it passes and works, on the other hand, it will be viewed as a Democratic victory no matter what the GOP does, which is why the cynic in me thinks the so-called moderates intentionally stripped the most stimulative provisions out of the Senate bill — they want to increase the likelihood of passage and failure, even as they play CYA by showing what wonderful “bipartisan compromisers” they are.
    Jesus, I’ve gotten cynical!

  2. Good analysis, tgirsch.
    Interesting that The Hill calmly says “the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to pass difficult legislation.” Apparently, filibustering everything more controversial than a Post Office dedication is OKIYAR as far as Our Liberal Media is concerned.

  3. //House Democrats on Tuesday said they are prepared to negotiate past Presidents Day rather than cave to GOP Senate centrists on the details of the economic stimulus package.//
    Fine. Negotiate forever if you want. Delay is good. Why burn money today if you can put it off until tomorrow.
    //if it doesn’t work.// It won’t work. Claims will be made that it worked even if it doesn’t. If anyone at all in the country is still employed two years from now someone will claim that they’d be unemployed too if not for Obama and the dems in congress.
    Which begs the question: how will success be measured? What are the metrics?

  4. It PROMPTS the question, d’d’d’dave. Obama mentioned 4M jobs. How one would differentiate Obama jobs from standard business cycle recovery jobs, I can’t say.
    Do the usual filibuster rules apply to bills coming back out of conference?

  5. Prompts, begs: what’s the difference?
    4M jobs from what base? I’ve heard ‘create X new jobs’ and ‘save X new jobs’. One could claim to have saved 4M jobs if that is all that is left in country in 2 years.

  6. humans beg, inanimate things prompt, one question prompts another but doesn’t beg? Seriously, please improve my vocabulary.

  7. Claims will be made that it worked even if it doesn’t.
    And vice versa.
    How will we know? We won’t. We’ll make our best educated guess based on the information we have.
    Some people will think one thing, and some another. Just like now.

  8. It’s also worth remembering that 61-37 is a pretty decisive margin. It’s only “close” when viewed through the lens of the Senate’s anti-majoritarian procedural rules
    The inability of Reid to either keep Republicans from filibustering or make them pay for doing so should alone be enough to kick him out of his leadership post.
    TrilobiteInteresting that The Hill calmly says “the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to pass difficult legislation.”
    Yeah, I heard what was probably one of the jokers at Politico on WTOP radio (the DC news station) just blithely state something like “remember, the democrats only have 58 votes, and you need 60 to pass a bill in the Senate”, without any need to, you know, point out the Republicans were filibustering.

  12. Conference Reports are filibusterable*, but a filibuster is not the issue here:

    Just as the bill was subject to a budget point of order in the Senate, so will the conference report be. So the Senate will need 60 votes, filibuster or no, to pass any conference report. That, too, will increase pressure on the House to defer to the Senate position. Senate conferees will no doubt insist that nothing but their Perfect and All-Wise version of the bill could ever muster the necessary 60 votes, and House conferees will have to measure any changes they propose against the likelihood that the Senate’s claims are true.

    ——————
    *Because amendments can’t be added to Conference Reports, a filibuster would have to be “the Mr Smith talkathon” type, not the “keep debate open while we dream up amendments to add” type.

  13. I would *love* to see them talk for two weeks, refusing to allow a vote. This is the perfect “kill the filibuster” issue. Can you imagine the optics of that?
    Make them talk…..

  15. the cynic in me thinks the so-called moderates intentionally stripped the most stimulative provisions out of the Senate bill — they want to increase the likelihood of passage and failure, even as they play CYA by showing what wonderful “bipartisan compromisers” they are.
    I’d be more inclined to believe this if Collins and Nelson had been acting as go-betweens. Instead, they were negotiating for their own votes. It’s hard to believe that someone in that position would want the stimulus to fail. After all, Republican or not, Collins, Snowe, and Specter are going to be pretty strongly identified with the bill.

  16. I would *love* to see them talk for two weeks, refusing to allow a vote. This is the perfect “kill the filibuster” issue. Can you imagine the optics of that?
    Not an issue here. The stimulus bill doesn’t need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. It needs 60 votes because of Senate budgetary rules. There is no option to make them talk and talk in this particular instance.
    The issue is that this increases the deficit, and so needs a 3/5 vote for a point of order to waive the usual pay-go rules.

  17. Bernard:
    Republican or not, Collins, Snowe, and Specter are going to be pretty strongly identified with the bill.
    I view them as hedging their bets, because you’re looking at blue state Republicans and red state Democrats. They’re trying to have their cake and eat it, too. If the stimulus is viewed as succeeding, they can say, “see, I supported it.” And if it’s seen as failing, they can say “at least we worked to rein it in.”

  18. It’s an effective tactic to focus the entire dispute on the size of the stimulus and ignore the content of the bill. Betsy McCaughey asserts at Bloomberg.com that the Senate version contains many of the recommendations set forth in Daschle’s book and by placing significant health policy legislation in the stimulus bill without debate it also follows Daschle’s view of the way to move social policy forward without a lot of controversy in Congress. I guess he got these pieces in before he went down in flames. He will probably figure out how to make some big bucks if the provisions stay in.
    I’m probably too old already to worry too much about this. I know that as of now none of my health records can be released or transferred from one medical facility or practitioner to another without my authorization. There are a number of items in this bill that make me think the wire taps that got so much attention in combating terrorism will look like small potatoes once we are coerced to waive privacy rights over medical records.

  19. There are a number of items in this bill that make me think the wire taps that got so much attention in combating terrorism will look like small potatoes once we are coerced to waive privacy rights over medical records.
    Speaking as someone in the EMR industry (however loosely), don’t worry: that’s not going to happen.

  21. tgirsch,
    Maybe Nelson is hedging, but I don’t see it for Collins or Snowe. Collins just got re-elected by a 20-point margin, and Snowe is very popular also, and is not up until 2012.
    I don’t see either one as playing some deep game. I suspect Snowe was on board all along, and Collins – not the sharpest knife in the drawer IMO – actually did want some of those changes herself.
    Specter is a different story, as he has to fend off lunatics on his right as well as a Democratic opponent. Who knows what his strategic calculations are.

  22. Eric,
    Its better if you tell why this is stimulus, not just say, oh, its not important.
    Daschle has shown how trustworthy he is, and he and Rahm Emmanuel obviously know the script on how to slip through controversial legislation.
    How do you think the health related provisions get taken out and why do you think they are in there in the first place? You don’t have to answer, but if you do, tell the truth.

  23. I’m probably too old already to worry too much about this. I know that as of now none of my health records can be released or transferred from one medical facility or practitioner to another without my authorization. There are a number of items in this bill that make me think the wire taps that got so much attention in combating terrorism will look like small potatoes once we are coerced to waive privacy rights over medical records.
    I don’t understand this at all. Your records can be released and transferred without your authorization right now: this only requires that someone break the normal procedure. If your records were electronic, the same thing would be true. People can always break rules. The difference is that with electronic records, at least you have an audit trail and strong cryptography so you’ll have a chance of knowing if someone accessed your information. With paper records, you’ll never know.
    There seems to be a bizarre assumption that electronic records are inherently less secure than paper records.

  24. Bernard:
    I hear what you’re saying. I think my problem is that I’m trying to make sense of what the four “moderates” did, when in real life it simply doesn’t make any sense.

  25. I think the NE4 sincerely believe that the stimulus should not be more than some $800B (apparently with the ATM included in the $800B), but that can actually be used to facilitate a compromise that gets back a lot of the House spending, because I dont think that the spending/tax mix is really all that important to them other than to help their negotiating position. Just take out the house and car purchase credits which are far less stimulative since it mostly is going to benefit persons who would have purchased anyway and replace them with some of the House spending. On the ATM fix, which probably shouldnt be offset this year anyway, split the effect, by allowing the stimulus cost to go up to $835B which is about where the Senate bill was with room thus for another $35B to add back in spending cut in the senate. The NE4 will still be able to say that which they want to say, which is that they kept the total cost of the stimulus down and since that is what they make the biggest deal of they can hardly vote against the final package if it is in that ballpark.

  26. Thanks, J. Michael & Model62. 60 is 60 either way, but if the problem is a pretty reasonable budget rule rather than an abused privilege, it is somehow less frustrating. To me, anyway.

  28. I think my problem is that I’m trying to make sense of what the four “moderates” did, when in real life it simply doesn’t make any sense.
    Mine too.
    Maybe Gregspolitics is right that they just drew a line at $800 billion, though that doesn’t explain the change in the mix. Some of that mix seems to have been corrected in conference.

  29. Did you say that Hoyer rocks?
    Trust me, that will be a temporary state.
    The guy’s my Congresscritter, as well as being House Majority Leader, so I kinda have to pay attention to him, being the political junkie I am. He’s very good on some things, very bad on others. Good enough that you can’t just write him off as a total loss when he’s kowtowing to business interests, but bad enough to be pretty damned infuriating at times.
    He’s a pretty potent ally when he’s on your side, though.

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