[Vision2020] Senate Vote-a-rama Cometh

[Tom Hansen]

The GOP strategy to kill the reconciliation bill?

Shame Democrats by forcing them to reject good amendments, like "prohibiting 
coverage of Viagra for child molesters and rapists."

Courtesy of the Washington Post at:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/vote-a-rama_cometh.html

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Vote-a-rama cometh

Yesterday, the Republicans' gambit to derail the vote on the reconciliation 
fixes was thrown out by the Senate parliamentarian. That's not the end of 
their options, but it means they're left trying to slow the bill down rather 
than stop it altogether.

The budget reconciliation process limits debate to 20 hours, which means you 
can't filibuster. But it doesn't limit the number of amendments you can 
propose. So that's where Republicans are concentrating their efforts: As of 
this writing, the prescribed 20 hours of debate leading up to those 
amendments is ongoing, and Democrats have decided to give up their remaining 
seven hours to speed the process along. When that ends, the GOP has at least 
32 amendments waiting, and they could introduce hundreds, or even thousands, 
more. The expectation is that the Senate should get to the amendments 
tonight (at least barring another Republican attempt to make everyone go 
home at 2 p.m.). At that point vote-a-rama commences.

Vote-a-rama is what happens when the Senate has a ton of amendments to deal 
with and not a lot of time to deal with them. Each amendments gets a minute 
of debate on both sides and then a 10-minute vote. They go till the 
amendments are finished. In this case, they're likely to go well into the 
night.

Republicans could try to stretch this out by proposing 600 more amendments. 
But someone would have to write those amendments. They would all have to be 
germane to the bill and friendly to the deficit. And Democrats can just keep 
knocking them back. The Republican strategy, however, appears to have moved 
from delay to embarrassment. Because Senate Democrats don't want to change 
the reconciliation bill and send it back to the House for another vote, they 
want to reject all Republican amendments. So Republicans are proposing 
amendments that will be embarrassing for them to reject. This strategy has 
reached its logical apotheosis in Sen. Tom Coburn's amendment "prohibiting 
coverage of Viagra for child molesters and rapists."

But embarrassment is temporary. Delay, particularly in the Senate, can be 
forever. So why have Republicans apparently moved away from the 
endless-amendments strategy?

The answer is that Obama already signed the Senate bill and Democrats 
already celebrated. When it seemed that the Senate bill wouldn't pass until 
reconciliation finished, there was energy on the Republican side to do 
everything possible to kill or slow reconciliation. Now that the Senate bill 
is finished and the Democrats are celebrating and the cameras are slowly 
flickering off? Well, sitting around voting on 632 amendments is no more fun 
for the Republicans than the Democrats, and they have families they want to 
see and fundraisers they need to attend. Obstruction would be no more fun 
for them than for the Democrats, and it might make them look petulant in the 
eyes of voters who want Congress to just move on from health care already.

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho