FIVE POINTS: Groundhog Day in the Senate
1. The September 30th deadline for Graham Cassidy is important and not important. Well, I was dead wrong about health care. I did not think there was any appetite among the GOP to bring back ACA repeal. I'm still doubtful that anything will pass the Senate, but they are obviously making another run at it, and I did not think that would happen. My best guess is that they won't find the votes and they will never put it on the floor. I certainly don't think they would go to the floor and take a roll call without the votes, risking another embarrassing defeat. But I guess anything's possible at this point.
Everyone and their brother is writing about the Graham-Cassidy bill, so I'm only going to mention a few things related to timing. The Senate parliamentarian ruled earlier this month that budget reconciliation instructions expire at the end of the fiscal year, which is September 30th. There are consequences to this deadline, but they aren't necessarily what people think they are
The deadline doesn't automatically end repeal efforts. But it probably does at a practical level. The Senate can always try regular legislation to repeal the ACA, which would require 60 votes to overcome the inevitable Dem filibuster. But if the GOP wanted to continue past September 30th with majoritarian efforts, they could write such reconciliation instructions into the FY18 budget resolution. The problem is that (1) they would have to actually pass an FY18 budget resolution, which may not happen and would have political costs if it does happen; and (2) it would likely prevent them (at least practically) from writing reconciliation instructions for tax reform in the FY18 budget resolution. They could also just blow things up and overrule the parliamentarian to keep the FY17 instructions alive into October. But that seems unlikely, because they'd need 50 votes to do that, and...
If they have 50 votes, they will pass something next week. The timing is tight---they aren't coming back until Tuesday and in theory want to be gone by Friday for Yom Kippur---but if they have the votes for the bill, I doubt they will have much trouble moving it quickly. Don't buy into any talk about the Democrats being able to run out the clock by using a fililbuster-by-amendment strategy; if there are 50 votes, they will have (or create) the procedural tools to dispense with such obstruction. There are good precedents for ruling dilatory motions out of order post-cloture; they could probably (and justifiably) be easily adapted to plainly dilatory amendments under reconciliation. Similarly, the House can/will put up a special rule to waive rule layovers (if you really want to know, I wrote way too much about this once upon a time) and move the bill as fast as they want.
The timing makes getting to 50 harder. The Graham-Cassidy bill won't even get its Byrd Bath---the meeting at which the Senate parliamentarian weighs in on which parts of the bill violate the Byrd rule and thus will be subject to a point of order---until Tuesday, which means that the coalition they are trying to put together can't really be finalized until after that; people on the fence just aren't going to sign on until they see the final proposal, and if certain parts of the bill are Byrd-able, the whole thing might collapse. To the degree that we don't know how the parliamentarian is going to rule on several aspects of the bill, all of the negotiating going on now is really just contingent. Locking down a coalition over the weekend, for instance, would be pretty surprising. It's also the case that you can no longer pretend this is a placeholder bill for a conference negotiation final product. This is the bill.
The timing probably jams the House. If Graham-Cassidy does make it out of the Senate, that's probably the final bill and the House will have to take it or leave it. It's just unlikely there would be time to amend it in the House and get it back to the Senate and reassemble a coalition around the new House-amended version. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the Senate left town after passing the bill, just to make sure the House is jammed with a take-it-or-leave-it Graham-Cassidy bill. Which could be an issue because...
2. The Graham-Cassidy proposal isn't a slam dunk in the House. Lots of people, including me, have been thinking through whether a Senate-passed Graham-Cassidy bill would be able to get 218 votes in the House. Matt Fuller, who you should trust on these things, thinks they would have the votes.The Washington Post also did a nice rundown of the swing votes today.
The American Health Care Act narrowly passed the House back in may, 217-213. If you start from that 217 coalition, as Fuller notes, you can add four votes for the GOP (because one GOP Rep didn't vote, and the GOP captured 3 of the 4 seats vacant at the time). That gets you to 221. Subtract one because Jason Chaffetz voted for the bill and his seat is now empty. So you are at 220.
The problem is that the Graham-Cassidy bill is terrible for California and New York, which puts the 17 Republicans from those states who voted for the AHCA in a tough spot. Nine of them are in districts that make them plausibly vulnerable in 2018: Issa (CA-49), Rohrabacher (CA-48), Royce (CA-39), Denham (CA-10), Faso (NY-19), Knight (CA-25), Tenney (NY-22), Walters (CA-45), and Zeldin (NY-1). And that doesn't count Stefanik (NY-21) or Valadeo (CA-21). And Peter King (NY-2) is already talking poorly about the bill.
That said, House leaders are skilled at growing votes. They will easily lean on most of those Members to vote for the bill, or at least be available to vote for it if it will make the difference. This is sometimes referred to as "being in the Speaker's pocket" and it makes close votes much harder to count from the outside. The AHCA only got 217 votes, but we don't know how many people would have been willing to vote for it if the alternative was it not passing. And we don't know how many people will be in that position on Graham-Cassidy.
Fuller suggested that Reichert (WA-8) (who is retiring), Comstock (VA-10), Hurd (TX-23), and Biggs (AZ-5) might be ACHA no votes who could be swung to yes on Graham-Cassidy if it meant preventing failure. Massie also voted against it from the right, but he may be a lost cause.
So the math is a bit more complicated than it looks. And we really don't know where the NY/CA GOPers will be. On the AHCA, only three NY GOPers (Reed, Katko, Donovan) voted against it. You might get that same number again. Or you might have eight (everyone but Collins (27)), especially if it's going down on the floor. I would expect, in the end, that the House leadership would be able to find the votes. But it's certainly not a slam dunk and it will be a tough vote for a whole host of Members (including a handful who aren't from NY/CA).
3. What would you say ... you ... do all day? This week,I published a review of Josh Chafetz wonderful new book, Congress's Constitution. Obviously, I recommend you read the review (and the book!). Here's an excerpt:
4. Puerto Rico is part of the United States. I spent most of my twenties studying statehood. I don't agree with the Insular Cases, but I certainly understand that the unincorporated territories have a somewhat different status under the Constitution than, say, Iowa does or the Arizona Territory did. But those concerns are largely irrelevant in the current hurricane disaster. If 3 million U.S. citizens were potentially going to be without electricity for 3-6 months following a natural disaster, you'd think it would be the lead news story on everyone's mind, even if they were living on an island in the Indian Ocean owned by a foreign government.
A lot of liberals think this is some sort of racial or cultural thing about Spanish-speaking non-whites, but I think it's probably more simple than that. After all, Hawaii is majority non-white, and I don't think people would have much less interest or not be pressing for massive public aid if those 1.2 million Americans were hit by this level of disaster. People are just naturally more interested in knowing about and helping Americans over foreigners, which may be lamentable but is certainly reality. And most people draw a red line about who is and isn't part of our country. They don't know these are U.S. citizens, and they don't see them as part of the United States. But they are and they are, and supporting aid packages for Houston and Florida while ignoring P.R. is not, to me, defensible under any rational or ethical standard. It's just a 21st century version of neglectful colonialism.
I'm not a crusader for Puerto Rico statehood and I don't think the colonial arrangements of our external territories are inherently morally untenable. But to the degree it prevents us from providing them with anything remotely resembling basic equality in regard to things like disaster relief, it's a total embarrassment.
5. Twenty-five years ago today, Blind Melon was released. I never really liked Blind Melon, but they are always one of the first bands that comes to mind when I think of the 1992-1994 era in popular music. That was the tail end of MTV being super-relevant, and the Buzz Bin was taking on new relevance and helping to break all sorts of alternative-ish artists. I know I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit as a Buzz Bin video, and I'm pretty sure it's also where I first saw Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, and the Gin Blossoms. But it's that No Rain video that I will always associate most with Buzz Bin. The sad storyline about the bee girl. The out-of-focus camera shots of the band. The seemingly happy music matched with the depression lyrics. It was on constantly, and it was constantly intriguing. There has long been a debate about how much grunge actually departed from hard rock musically. But there's no doubt it was a sea-change aesthetically.
And as much as early 90s grunge was fueled by anger, one thing that really set it apart from the 80s hair metal that preceded it was the introspective focus on unhappiness. And I don't understand why I sleep all day. This is not what tended to make for a hit radio rock song in the late 80s. Those songs may have been happy or sad. But they were more often about tangible, outward things, like partying or relationships gone bad. GenX depression didn't go mainstream until 1992 or so. And for all the anger on Nevermind and Ten, it's moody songs like No Rain and Today and Creep and Under the Bridge that I most associate with that time period. I'm sure it didn't hurt that I was 14 in 1992. I was probably in the sweet spot where I was just starting to look for something a little more deep than Open Up and Say Ahhh and Dr. Feelgood but not really angry enough at anything to think Why Go was speaking to me.
See you next time (probably end of next week). Thanks for reading!