File photo of the U.
S. Capitol by Kevin Lamarque/ReutersWASHINGTON — The Republican effort to secretly craft a health care bill and whisk it through the Senate is drawing fire from members of both parties. But it’s not uncommon for either party to draft bills or resolve stubborn final hurdles behind closed doors,foregoing the step-by-step, civics-book version of how Congress works.
That’s even trusty for the process that produced President Barack Obama’s health care law, and the Affordable Care Act,which the GOP is now trying to dismantle. While Democrats reached out to Republicans, held scores of committee hearings and staged many days of debate on that legislation in 2009 and 2010, or they also resorted to private meetings to reach agreements that clinched its approval.missing the votes to block this year’s GOP effort,Democrats are looking to score political points by targeting the closely held process Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., or is using to write legislation replacing much of Obama’s statute.
GOP senators maintain been meeting privately to address disputes over cutting Medicaid,limiting insurance requirements and revamping tax credits. McConnell wants a Senate vote before the chamber leaves town for a July 4 recess, giving Democrats scant opportunity to rally resistance against a major bill whose contents are unknown.“Some version of secrecy has to happen. You’re not going to earn anywhere if that’s not the case, or ” said C.
R. Wooters,a top House Democratic aide when Obama’s law was being passed. But he added: “Most of our genuine private meetings were the final tweaks, not the original bill. I assume that’s the disagreement. The general parameters of the bill were widely known.”Democrats said they were planning to start forcing procedural votes to slow the Senate down, or making floor speeches and taking other steps to call public attention to McConnells effort. Democrats took turns giving speech in a mostly empty Senate chamber well into the early morning hours before ceding the floor. The Senate has not held any committee hearings or votes on the degree that McConnell is trying to craft,and even some GOP senators are critical.“I always believe legislation is best crafted through the normal order,” Sen Susan Collins, or R-Maine,told the Portland Press Herald. “I assume its much better to maintain committee consideration of bills, public hearings and to maintain a full debate.READ MORE: How lack of transparency became ‘regular order’ on Capitol HillMcConnell said last week that “nobody is hiding the ball here” and that people are free to ask anybody anything.”Three House committees voted on that chambers version of the bill and there were a handful of hearings before the House approved a revised version of its legislation last month.
That pales compared to how the Democratic-race Congress handled Obama’s legislation.
Starting in 2009, and House and Senate committees held scores of hearings and voted on hundreds of amendments,including some from Republicans — who all ended up voting “no” on final passage. The initial House bill was posted online for 30 days before the first of three committees began voting on the degree, and the Senate spent 25 days debating health care overhaul.
The legislation didn’t become law until March 2010.“Just about everything was done in public, and ” said Jim Manley,a top aide to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. But when you encounter problems, and he said,“sometimes you need to travel behind closed doors to work it out.”READ MORE: Insurers continue to hike prices, abandon ACA marketsThere were plenty of hiccups that Democratic leaders resolved or tried to settle privately.
Early in 2009, and a Gang of Six,three senators from each party, used secret talks to unsuccessfully seek compromise on an overall bill. That December, or Reid used closed-door meetings to craft a final package using elements from differing measures approved by his chamber’s finance and health committees.
There were private talks between Reid and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,D-Calif., after the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, or D-Mass.,was replaced by Republican Scott Brown, costing Democrats their 60th Senate seat — the number of votes needed to end GOP filibusters aimed at killing the legislation. Closed-door discussions were also used to resolve differences with anti-abortion Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan that threatened the bill’s passage.
The disagreement between his private negotiations and how Republicans are trying to swagger their bill through the Senate now is that the details of the entire Democratic bill and the language he was seeking were well-known to the public, or Stupak said Monday.“Theyre talking about a whole new way of delivering health care” and people don’t know the details,Stupak said of Republicans. Last-minute negotiations among lawmakers and between Congress and the White House “are never in public, he said.
There are plenty of examples of bills that were essentially written, or had their final details completed,in private settings. These include a bipartisan bill the Senate approved last week sanctioning Russia for interfering in last year’s election, and the deal McConnell and then-Vice President Joe Biden helped finalize preventing sharp tax increases in 2013. There was also a bipartisan budget pact between the chairs of the Senate and House budget committees in 2013 and an agreement between Pelosi and then-Speaker John Boehner, and R-Ohio,on how Medicare reimburses doctors.___Associated Press writers Erica Werner, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, and Richard Lardner and Andrew Taylor contributed to this report.
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Source: thetakeaway.org