Ezra Klein on the issue. He interprets the Republicans' meaning charitably; it might be an inside baseball thing, but I really don't see how it's good "messaging" to make a declaration that even someone who only half paid attention in civics could spot the problem in, and suspect a lust to engage in Wisconsonian shenanigans.
It's not even a paradox, though. The House measure would work perfectly non-paradoxically, as far as I can tell, IFF the Senate passed it into law. Given that the Senate hasn't, it doesn't mean anything at all.
Yeah, the Economist is kind of running away with itself there.
Although, come to think, I'm not looking at the language of the measure, which could be tangled up as described by the Economist. But the substantive effect set forth could be achieved without any necessary paradox.
Ezra Klein is interpreting everything charitably these days. He's really gunning for mainstream punditry. "Paul Ryan has a difficult job"? Really?
That article is saying one could, using language similar to the House measure, pass paradoxical bills, not that they have.
If the House has not received a message from the Senate before April 6, 2011, stating that it has passed a measure providing for the appropriations for the departments and agencies of the Government for the remainder of fiscal year 2011, the provisions of H.R. 1, as passed by the House on February 19, 2011, are hereby enacted into law.
Looking at HR 1255, there's no paradox at all. If the Senate passed the same language, and so HR 1255 became a law, it would operate perfectly straightforwardly -- the Senate's failure to pass a different budget by April 6 would constitute passage of HR 1 by the Senate.
(Saying that it's not paradoxical doesn't mean that it's procedurally permissible -- I don't know that Senate rules allow that sort of conditional passage of a bill. But there's nothing logically strange about it.)
I think that aspect (indirect passage) is the same as the House did eventually in 2010 with the Senate health reform bill, "deem-and-pass."
Actually, I'm coming around a bit now - it could be that deem-and-pass is uncommon enough that they didn't know the right language, and only accidentally made the implication that the House could enact something by itself.
Oh, wait, the House considered deem-and-pass last year but didn't actually do it.
I don't know what I'm talking about with Congressional procedure, but I'm pretty sure that 'deem and pass' didn't have the conditional aspect here -- "Bill X will have passed if Event Y does not happen". (Actually, I can't recall what the procedural problem was that 'deem and pass' solved at all.)
As I recall, deem-and-pass didn't solve a procedural problem at all, just a superficial appearance problem. The House needed to a) pass the Senate bill and b) pass the amendments to it that would be added via reconciliation. They were so pissy with the Senate that they didn't want to vote for (a) on its own, so instead they just included a sentence to (b) that said that the Senate bill was "deemed" passed too--which is, of course, the same as voting for it directly.
Or, they were going to. As Minivet points out, this idiocy was abandoned after a few days of blanket coverage by Fox News.
No, no conditional aspect, just the incorporation of text by reference instead of, as is normal, actually including the whole text.
Here's a CRS report on the practice. The proper language would have been something like "HR1 shall be considered as adopted in the House."
In the case of health reform, I think it was only had psychological value - the representatives would have had one degree of separation between their vote and the Senate bill their vote affirmed. In this case, the charitable interpretation is that they wanted to pass HR1 prefaced by an ultimatum, instead of simply passing it again.
Also the preznit would have to sign it. /obvious
I thought the problem that was supposed to be solved by deem-and-pass in the health-care-reform context was that
(a) Senate members didn't want to pass the House amendments before the House acted,
(b) House members were concerned that if they passed the Senate bill and the House amendments the Senate would just decline to pass the amendments (which would leave the unamended Senate bill as law), so
(c) the House wanted to pass a bill that would deem the Senate bill to have passed the House when and only when the Senate also adopted the amendments.
Which wasn't so much an appearance problem as a lack of trust between the chambers. The "appearance" argument, again if I recall correctly, was a separate argument made by critics of the deem-and-pass procedure who said that it would allow House members to evade accountability for passing the Senate bill (which, in substance, they would have to do).
But I haven't bothered looking any of this up, so it's possible I've just described an elaborate fantasy scenario that has nothing to do with what actually happened.
16: I always forget that bit. Somewhere in the back of my brain I have 'veto' listed as a positive action, and forget that the Pres. has to actively sign a bill into law.
I'm sorry to say that House Republicans have, with this, gone from assholish and silly to demented. Inmates running the asylum and all that.
I don't know why Ezra Klein is being charitable about it; perhaps because it's too embarrassing otherwise.
17: That could be it. The CRS report does say when it's used it tends to surround "House-Senate relations" issues.
18: The President can let a bill become law without signing it, but that's an affirmative action too.
18, 20: I thought that depended on whether you're near the end of a session (in which case "do nothing" = "pocket veto") or not (in which case "do nothing" = "permit the bill to become law").
Somewhere in the back of my brain
I keep that one in my pocket.
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Somewhere I'd previously run across the fact that Harry Connick Jr.'s father had been DA in New Orleans (actually for the parish of Orleans) but I did not realize what a total dick he was. (The five Supreme Court justices, I already knew were.) In looking him up I was amused to find out that there is Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame located in Winnfield (Huey Long's hometown).
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21: Yes, but effectively they're two different courses of action.
Stupid people want us to be laid off. by us, I mean people who work for the government. We have been told, because of my particular position, that we are 'essential' because we make sure money gets deposited.
But still, it's stupid. And its really stressful. I was unemployed for over two years before I got the job. And if I hadn't, and then gotten insurance (took six months because I'm technically seasonal), my husband might have lost his foot rather than part of an infected toe.
The people running this country don't give a sh!t about anyone who doesn't make more than about $10 million a year. The rest of us are just cannon fodder and wastage as far as they are concerned. It makes me really angry.