How quickly Democrats forget. A dozen years ago, President Barack Obama faced strong and justified criticism for backtracking on his promise, made numerous times during the 2008 presidential campaign, to televise health-care negotiations on C-SPAN:
By this year’s standards, however, the process that led to Obamacare—the law that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, said we had to pass in order to find out what’s in it—seems like a veritable exercise in transparency and open government. It’s gotten so bad that press reports over the weekend suggest Democrats may look to create a carbon tax—which could impose massive new burdens on working-class Americans—without so much as a single hearing in Congress on the proposal.
“I’ve had a carbon pricing bill in my desk for the last three years just waiting for the time,” Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told The New York Times. Funny how he didn’t mention that fact before the election last November or show the American people the details of what he proposes.
Meaningless Markups
Sure, committees in the House of Representatives marked up their portions of the reconciliation bill last month. The House Budget Committee amalgamated those committee prints into a colossal mega-bill, H.R. 5376, which they introduced September 27.
But people in Washington recognize that 2,468-page monstrosity for what it is: An opening offer never intended to constitute the final version of the legislation. Democrats needed to mark up something—anything—to get the process going, and began with the provisions in H.R. 5376. They did so knowing full well that major portions of the bill would get re-written. That’s because of several reasons:
- To make technical changes as the process moves along, because executive agencies often cannot provide immediate logistical feedback on such a massive bill going through such a rushed process;
- To comply with the “Byrd rule” and other procedural elements of budget reconciliation legislation in the Senate; and
- To appease the factions and demands of lawmakers within the Democratic caucus, a large number of whom have insisted on various changes (many of them self-contradictory) for them to vote for the bill.
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