- Rick Klein and Shushannah Walsh:
- “Want to really blow up the Senate – and fast?
A new proposal is emerging that would likely do just that, and it has nothing to do with Senate Democrats’ vow to filibuster Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch.
A proposal is being pushed by some Senate Republicans that would seek to ensure that a House-passed bill could be passed intact by only a simple majority of senators.”
“How would that work?
Well, the vice president, of course, is the president of the Senate.
The thinking goes
- that if the Senate parliamentarian ruled that parts of the bill can’t be folded into budget reconciliation, Vice President Mike Pence could simply overrule that.
- ‘That alone, I think, would break the logjam,’ he told reporters Thursday.
Perhaps, but that’s not all it would break. This would be the executive branch’s changing the rules of the upper legislative body.
Filibusters could be broken, perhaps in any circumstance, at the whim of the vice president.
In honor of a certain former veep, that would be a BFD.”
Here's more from an excerpt from another source about the option of "The Nuclear Option for Legislation in the Senate":
Cruz Pushes Obamacare Repeal Gambit That Could Roil the Senate... Cruz’s answer:
- lean on Vice President Mike Pence’s gavel to dodge those procedural limits and broaden the legislation’s scope.
It’s not at all clear whether Cruz’s colleagues will go along.
The move relies on a radical interpretation of the vice president’s constitutional role as presiding officer of the Senate,
- where he could step in and effectively overrule the chamber’s parliamentarian.
... Representative Dave Brat of Virginia, the conservative who unseated then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a 2014 primary, told reporters he doesn’t buy leadership’s excuse that they can’t pursue a far bolder plan.
He said Ryan is overstating the case that existing rules can’t allow an insurance overhaul. “He wants to be respectful of Senate rules, I do not,” Brat said.
“From what I understand,” Brat said, “whoever’s sitting in the chair has authority over the parliamentarian.
So they can rewrite the rules.”
To speed passage of an Obamacare replacement -- and circumvent Democratic opposition, Republicans opted for a budgetary procedure called reconciliation
- that requires only a simple majority in the Senate,
but only if the legislation has minimal effect on the deficit.
GOP leaders, including Ryan, have said this is limiting their ability to include provisions popular with conservatives like selling insurance across state lines.
The Texas senator, who had dinner with Trump this week, said Ryan and Senate GOP leaders are wrong.
“You don’t need to override the parliamentarian or get a new parliamentarian.
It is the vice president who rules,” he told reporters Thursday.
Having Pence rule against established norms for what is allowed in a reconciliation bill would undo decades of Senate tradition of deferring to the parliamentarian’s rulings.
It could also potentially allow both parties far wider latitude in the future to avoid a 60-vote threshold for all sorts of provisions that don’t directly impact spending or taxes.
Representative Trent Franks of Arizona, another conservative, said
- trying to craft an Obamacare repeal bill to meet the Senate’s current interpretation of its rules is "untenable."
"... If you get the job done he looks a little differently on the other side," he said.
... "Under the Budget Act of 1974, which is what governs reconciliation, it is the presiding officer, the vice president of the United States, who rules what is permissible on reconciliation and what is not,” Cruz said.
“And that is a conversation I have been having with a number of my colleagues.” ...