Slaughterhouse Rules?

I’ve been doing some reading on the Self-Executing Rule, also known as the “Deem and Pass” procedure, also known as the “Slaughter Rule”. That last one was obviously created because it sounds awesome; the actual procedure, however, is fairly straightforward. While initial reports made it sound rather sketchy, perhaps even nefarious, a more detailed analysis has led me to believe it’s not. The gist of the situation, as I understand it, is as follows:

The House does not like the Senate bill on its own, but will support it given the subsequent passage of a “fixes” package via reconciliation (an up-or-down, simple majority vote).

The passage of said package has some potential procedural problems, and many House members are worried about it actually passing after supporting the Senate bill. There’s talk of Obama waiting until the reconciliation package is passed before signing the Senate bill into law, but there doesn’t seem to be a definitive consensus on whether this is allowed.

The Democrats in particular are worried about electoral consequences of first voting for the Senate bill, and then for the reconciliation package, as Republicans have explicitly threatened to treat a vote for the Senate bill as a vote for the special treatment language for states like Florida (where there is currently some sort of exemption from Medicare reform in the Senate bill). Most House members also support the reconciliation package, which strips out the offending language that Republicans have threatened to utilize while campaigning during the midterm election. But the threats still stand from the Republican bloc even though, assuming the reconciliation bill passes, said threat will be technically incorrect in terms of legislation that is signed into law. As a result of these threats and the fact that, currently, the Republican minority is preventing an up or down vote on any further health care legislation in the Senate (thanks to the filibuster), the House may invoke the self-executing rule.

The self-executing rule, in a nutshell, combines two pieces of proposed legislation into a single entity for the purposes of voting. The talk of there being “no vote” on the legislation is inaccurate; rather, the self-executing rule allows for the House to vote on the reconciliation bill AND the Senate bill as a combined package, effectively achieving the same outcome we’d have were the fixes package to be passed via reconciliation after independent passage of the Senate bill.

In a smaller, more technical nutshell: the House will vote on the reconciliation bill–which is subsidiary to the Senate bill–and in passing the reconciliation bill, which modifies proposals in the Senate bill, the Senate bill will be “deemed passed.” In essence, a vote using the self-executing rule is still a normal vote on health reform (as it necessarily supports the Senate bill); it’s just a vote that guarantees the inclusion of the fixes package with the original bill, as opposed to separating the two votes

The Senate will still need to pass the fixes bill in their house. The Senate bill already passed in that house, however, so that portion will be available to Obama immediately for signing (assuming it passes). If the fixes package makes it to the Senate, it will only need a simple majority to pass and will be immune from the filibuster due to rules surrounding reconciliation.

And that’s the situation as far as I understand it. It’s a far cry from not holding a vote on the legislation, and it’s apparently become a rather common practice since the 1980s and the development of more partisan houses of Congress, by both Democratic- and Republican-controlled congresses (though the latter group has used it in a higher percentage of their bills historically, mostly post-1995). Use of the rule should have little to no effect on the ultimate legislative outcome. It could have a potentially large effect on the politics of the situation, however, as it might deny ammunition to the minority party for the coming election cycle.

Given that neither party has been loathe to use the procedure in the past, and because I personally believe the Republican Party has forced this mess upon themselves by blocking most attempts at holding a true up-or-down vote by abusing the filibuster, I’m not opposed to its use. It’s a very tricky procedural maneuver to be sure, and I wish it were possible to proceed without relying on such tactics. But as the minority party has refused to budge at all turns, and is now threatening to compound that abuse by politically attacking Democrats for voting for a bill in a manner brought about because of that same intractability, I can’t say that I’m very sympathetic to their complaints. It’s a politically motivated move, but neither side can escape blame for creating the situation that has prompted it.