Over at the AEI blog, Norman Ornstein calls out Republicans for their hypocrisy on the Slaughter Rule:
Any veteran observer of Congress is used to the rampant hypocrisy over the use of parliamentary procedures that shifts totally from one side to the other as a majority moves to minority status, and vice versa. But I can’t recall a level of feigned indignation nearly as great as what we are seeing now from congressional Republicans and their acolytes at the Wall Street Journal, and on blogs, talk radio, and cable news. It reached a ridiculous level of misinformation and disinformation over the use of reconciliation, and now threatens to top that level over the projected use of a self-executing rule by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the last Congress that Republicans controlled, from 2005 to 2006, Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier used the self-executing rule more than 35 times, and was no stranger to the concept of “deem and pass.”
First of all, Ornstein is a bit off on the process. The “self-executing rule” has indeed been used extensively by both parties, but in most cases it is used to insert amendments into a bill without floor debate or a separate up-or-down vote. (This is just one of the many ways the House Rules Committee stacks the deck against dissent and makes the House—not the Senate—the undemocratic body. But that’s another story.)
By contrast, the Democrats want to use a self-executing rule to pass legislation without debate, amendment, or an yea-or-nay vote. This is far rarer. Mostly, it’s done via the “Gephardt Rule,” which automatically passes a measure raising the federal debt ceiling by the amount required in a given year’s budget (thus avoiding a separate, embarrassing vote for members). When bills are “deemed” passed outside the Gephardt Rule, it is usually for the purpose of rubber stamping minor tweaks to conference reports, or for disposing of internal and/or technical matters that affect only the House. In fact, according to the Rules Committee Republicans, only four times in the last 20 years has a “deeming” rule been used to send legislation directly to the president’s desk — including one bill to raise the debt limit, and one to rubber-stamp “Byrd Rule” modifications to a reconciliation bill.
But process aside, my reaction to arguments such as Ornstein’s is that, if Republicans are being hypocritical and opportunistic, they’re doing it at their own peril. They’ve so thoroughly won the messaging war on both reconciliation and “deem and pass” that they’ve virtually guaranteed they will lose the messaging war if they reverse themselves once they are again in the majority.
So, far from the GOP hollering being hypocritical, it strikes me as — paradoxically, to be sure — principled. Both major parties have a vested political interest in maintaining the murky rules that allow majorities and minorities to do unseemly things under the cover of obscurity. That is why those rules endure. But that Republicans are willing to explode some of these institutions for the sake of defeating Obamacare tells you how noxious they really find it.
UPDATE: Yes, yes. I realize I am probably being hopelessly naive to suggest that the Republicans will stick to their guns on these obscurantist tactics once they are back in the majority. After all, in 2003, the Steny Hoyer’s Democrats had apparently found the “courage of their convinctions” only to lose them a few short years later:
