A Merged Senate Bill By Monday?

DEAR LORD, WHEN WILL THEY STOP!

Democratic leaders in the Senate are now planning on having a health care bill on the Senate floor by next Monday, much sooner than anyone had been expecting.

As it stands, the public has access to the health care bills as passed by the Senate Finance Committee (S. 1796) and the Senate HELPCommittee (S. 1679), but not to the merged version that will be brought to the floor for debate and votes. The merged version does in fact exist, however, and it’s currently being examined by the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO is expected to report their findings by the end of this week or Monday of next week. If their findings are to Senate Dems’ likings, the bill will be made available to the public on Monday.

What does this mean for the bill’s transparency? Basically, it means that if all goes according to the Senate Democratic leadership’s schedule, the first vote on the bill could occur just hours after the text and details of it are made available to the public. Senate Republicans and Democrats outside of the leadership would likely not have much more time than the rest of us to read the bill before they vote.

The reason, I assume, that the Senate feels they can justify this pace is that the vote that would be taking on Monday would not technically be a vote on the bill. It wouldn’t even be a vote on beginning the debate of the bill. It would be on a motion to invoke cloture on a motion to proceed to the debate. In other words, it would be a vote to overcome a Republican filibuster of even considering debating the bill. If that motion is approved — it would take 60 votes — the Senate would proceed to 30 clock hours of debating whether or not to begin the actual debate of the bill. Once those 30 hours are up, the Senate would then take another vote, requiring a simple majority of 51 votes, to begin the official debate. All of this would likely take until Thursday to pass. By that point, if the bill is in fact made public on Monday, it will have been officially available online for 72 hours before debate begins, just like it was in the House.

In reality, however, the vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed is not just procedural. It often has substantial implications. If some Democrat disliked the bill so much that they didn’t even want it debated on the floor, they could join with the Republicans on the motion and block it. Right now, that’s not expected to happen, but neither is it expected to be a pleasant, bipartisan event. It’s a little bit like “agreeing to the rule” in the House, which was a partisan vote that was held captive by conservative Democrats to force a vote on changing abortion language in the bill.

More here.