Where Are You?
So you’re in a meeting where the average age is over sixty-four years old. There are six attendees over eighty, and twenty-eight more over seventy. Near the “average” are thirty-eight members in their sixties. Everyone else are just “babies”: twenty-one in their fifties, six in their forties, and one really young one at thirty-five.
Maybe it’s the group meeting at the nursing home, with some of the staff sitting in. Or maybe it’s the afternoon weekday Mass at St. Theobald’s Catholic Church. Or, maybe it’s the Bingo game at the Lion’s Club!!
Well, it did seem like they were playing some kind of lame game. It’s called “Vote-a-Rama”. One member staggers up the microphone in the middle of the night and proposes “an amendment”, one of dozens. That member gives a brief speech about how that “amendment” would make things better. Then another member staggers up, and says why the “amendment” is a terrible idea.
Then they start a roll call vote, beginning with Tammy Baldwin, and ending one hundred names later with Todd Young. That takes about fifteen minutes or so. Each of the members wake up long enough to stagger to the front table and say “Yea” or “Nay”.
Fifty-Fifty
The results are announced, and the “game” starts all over again. I’m a little over the “average” age of the US Senate, so I turned C-Span off at 11:30 and headed for bed. When the dogs woke me up at six, I flipped it back on. Nothing looked different, except different Senators were coming to the microphone with their proposals. The “Vote-a-Rama” was still going strong.
What is the “Vote-a-Rama”? Think of it as penance, a punishment for the sin of avoiding the “hallowed” filibuster rule. In the United States Senate with one hundred members, it takes just fifty-one votes to pass a piece of legislation. That’s not the hard part. The Senate has a tradition of unlimited debate, so while it might only take a simple majority of votes to pass something, it requires sixty votes to end debate (end a filibuster) so that you CAN vote on final passage. In other terms, to get anything actually passed, sixty Senators have to agree to allow it.
In our fifty-fifty Nation, and Senate, it takes a lot to get ten members of the “other” party to agree. So not much gets done.
Work Around
But there is a “work around” written into the rules, called “budget reconciliation”. If a bill is about the budget of the United States, and if the Parliamentarian of the Senate agrees that all parts of the bill are “directly budget related”, then that bill can be brought under “budget reconciliation”. That kind of bill only requires a simple majority to end debate, as well as passage. And it’s limited to used three times a year, and there’s a “penance” involved for using it.
What’s the penance? First, there’s twenty hours, that’s clock hours, of debate, divided between the two parties. Then there are twenty more hours when any amendment can be offered to the “bill”, including amendments that aren’t “directly budget related” and must be passed by a sixty vote threshold. Republicans offered thirty different amendments, each with an introductory speech and an opposition response, and all designed to kill the bill. Each of those amendments had to be separately voted on; thus the seemingly endless number of roll call votes that droned on through the night and into Sunday.
It wasn’t until Sunday afternoon, around 2:30 pm, that the final roll was called for the final vote on the bill, the Inflation Reduction Act – BINGO!! It passed with fifty Democrats for, fifty Republicans against, and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote.
On the Floor
What was left “on the floor”? A proposal to cap the cost of insulin, the primary drug used by diabetics to control their condition, at $35 a month. Right now, it can cost from $335 to $1000 a month here in the United States, depending on the kind of insurance. But regardless of the cost, for folks with diabetes, insulin isn’t a luxury. It’s an absolute necessity of life.
The bill proposed that insulin for Medicare patients have the $35 cap. The Parliamentarian ruled that since that would create a significant reduction in spending, it fit in the “budget related” category. But a second portion of the bill would have extended that to all Americans, and since that wasn’t a government “spending” issue, the Parliamentarian said that required sixty, not fifty-one votes to pass.
All fifty Democrats agreed, joined by seven Republicans. But that wasn’t enough. Medicare recipients are capped, but Americans with private (or no) insurance are not.
Mo-Jo Lost
Which leads to another question – has Mitch McConnell, the “master tactician” of the Republican Senators, lost his “Mo-Jo”? Twice in the past two weeks he’s left his Republican colleagues with a political mess. It started with the PACT Act that would benefit veterans suffering from disease and disabilities caused by inhaling military trash burn pit smoke. Last week the vets gathered in front of the Capitol to celebrate its final passage. But when Democrat Chuck Schumer announced his “deal” with Senator Manchin for the budget reconciliation bill, McConnell told his Republicans to vote against PACT.
Republican Senators voted against helping veterans, and took a political beating for days. The criticism didn’t stop until the Senate revisited PACT and with Republicans joining in, passed it handily. Picking that fight was a lose-lose for McConnell: he stood against veterans, and then backed down to their pressure. Chalk a victory up for Schumer, the Democrats, and Veterans.
And then in the heat of the “Vote-a-Rama”, McConnell and his fellow Republicans could have “fixed” the insulin cost crisis. As much as they didn’t like the overall “Inflation Reduction Act”, regulating insulin costs would have been a “good” thing for the country. But instead, the Republicans shot it down, by only three votes. So now Republicans stand against reasonable drug prices for a century-old drug called insulin. They voted against diabetics, and for the drug companies.
Lose-Lose to Win-Win
Again, a lose-lose going into the November elections. While drug companies have lots of money, they don’t have lots of votes – the people do. And, overwhelmingly, the American people are in favor of reduced drug costs, particularly maintenance drugs like insulin.
Schumer, of course, took the political win from the awkward Republican stand, and then the actual win when the “Vote-a-Rama” finally ended, and the Inflation Reduction Act was passed. Good news for most Americans – but bad news for Republicans trying to convince the country that Democrats can’t get anything done.
