POETIC JUSTICE?
Judge Neil Gorsuch is about to get a promotion today. Unfortunately, it will come at the expense of the Senate as an institution. Using the nuclear option is never good. In this case it changes the Senate from an institution that recognizes and protects minority rights into a majoritarian institution that violates the careful and wise plans of the founders. How did we get here? Both parties share some of the blame. Republicans toyed with this bad idea back in 2005-6. Luckily cooler heads prevailed and they backed away. Democrats used the nuclear option to change precedent and allow cloture with only a simple majority vote on all nominations (except the Supreme Court) in 2013. In the face of extreme left pressure, Democrats refused to consider the qualifications of Judge Gorsuch and filibustered his nomination so that the only way to confirm this "well-qualified" (the ABA's opinion) person with an up or down vote for a position on the Supreme Court was to add Supreme Court Justices to the earlier cloture change made by the Democrats. This is the first time in the history of the Senate that a partisan filibuster has ever been used against a Supreme Court nominee. The proximate reason was because Judge Merrick Garland did not get an up or down vote last year. This is a hollow objection because when the shoe is on the other foot in 2020 and President Donald Trump nominates a conservative judge to replace Justice Steven Breyer, the Democrats will do anything possible to stop a vote on that judge until after the election in November. But given the changes that the Democrats set in motion in 2013, it may be too late for them to do anything about it.
The institution suffers because now that precedent setting votes have been used to overturn the rules of the Senate, the very nature of the Senate changes from an institution created by the Founding Fathers to protect minority rights into an institution that can use raw majority power to get its way. If this change happens in the future on the legislative filibuster, the United States Congress will change forever, and not for the better. The careful balance of power planned by the Founders between raw majority power in the House and protection of minority rights in the Senate will be gone forever. The result will be a lot more laws and, in many cases, bad laws.
HEALTH CARE HOBBLES ALONG
The effort to repeal Obamacare and create a new market driven, doctor-patient health care system in the U.S. continues to trip along. Vice President Mike Pence took up the effort last week to work with all of the various factions in the House Republican Conference to try and find the correct balance for a bill to repeal and replace the ACA. Work is being done now to write in legislative language an idea that would gather support from a number of the House Freedom Caucus members. It would allow states to make a choice on which health services to require in their states. The language has to be carefully written and that will take several days - and Members will begin to review it over the recess. In addition, there are ideas to make sure that people who have greater need for health services are helped also. One such proposal would provide that people who have higher medical bills would be given larger tax credits to support them. These ideas and others will have to be discussed when Members return. That means that it will take some time when members return the week of April 24 to sort out these issues.
While it is frustrating to those who want to expedite this process, it is helpful to remember that taking more time on the front end to get a solid deal can mean saving time on the back end of the process.
Going back up to 30,000 feet, the purpose of repeal and replace is to create a new health care system for all Americans so that all of us have better access to quality care, more benefits, better choices, transparency, competition, health savings accounts and better health care for our families.
Finally, the week Congress returns they will have to pass legislation to fund the government for the last five months of the fiscal year. It is expected that there will be an Omnibus spending bill offered. There are lots of moving parts to this bill: Increased defense spending, money to build a wall, limitations on spending for certain programs. The Trump Administration will have to be involved in the final product. At this point, it may be necessary to have a short-term CR but it is not expected that the government will shut down. However, that decision ultimately rests in the hands of the Senate Democrats.
David Hoppe was Speaker Paul Ryan's Chief of Staff and left his post in the Office of the Speaker in January 2017.
