The Slaughter Solution – The Height of Cynicism
March 11, 2010
The Slaughter Solution – The Height of Cynicism
Speaker Nancy Pelosi - “[W]e promised the American people that we would have the most honest and open government and we will.” (Press stakeout, December 6, 2006).
House Democrats are bound and determined to push their government takeover of health care, even though the American people have made it clear they don’t want any part of it. The public’s opposition has been communicated quite clearly to their Democratic and Republican representatives. The result? The Democratic Leadership simply does not have the votes to pass this bill. Left with no other option, they appear poised to skip that pesky vote altogether by employing what has come to be known as the “Slaughter Solution.”
As outlined by the Associated Press, the Slaughter Solution, named for its patron House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter, would allow House Democrats “to avoid a straightforward vote on the Senate-passed health care bill. Instead, they want a procedural vote that would simply declare the measure to have passed at the moment the Senate cleared the fix-it bill.” In other words, in order to fix the Senate-passed bill that everyone seems to hate so much, it must magically be deemed passed by the House. It’s a nifty idea that would allow House Democratic Leadership to ram through their unpopular health care bill without bothering to actually hold a vote on it. Not only would this be an astoundingly byzantine and cynical attempt to advance a bill that no one, including House Democrats, wants or likes, it could very well backfire.
The Slaughter Solution depends upon the Senate’s acting to pass a package of fixes to a bill that can’t garner sufficient support in the House. But the likelihood a clean “fix-it” bill passing the Senate is slim. There will be challenges to some proposed fixes, and therefore changes to the package. There are also questions as to whether or not a bill can be “fixed” under the Budget Act before it is signed into law by the President. And then there is the question of abortion. If an abortion change cannot be made through reconciliation, would the Slaughter Solution be further expanded to implement an abortion fix, too? How would that fix make its way through the Senate?
With serious unanswered questions like these, why would any wavering Democrat take the bait and support the Slaughter Solution? There is a high probability that House Democrats ultimately will be forced into taking the tough votes they tried so hard to avoid, after putting themselves on record as supporting an end-run around a real, transparent vote. In the end, rank-and-file Democrats would be making themselves all the more vulnerable for having supported their Leadership’s egregious tactics.
Rules Committee Ranking Republican David Dreier (R-San Dimas, CA) said the fact that the Democratic Majority is engaging in such extraordinary legislative chicanery to get this bill passed is irrefutable evidence that they simply cannot pass their bill while playing by the rules. “With the Slaughter Solution, House Democrats have exposed themselves as willing to abandon the most fundamental element of legislating – a transparent, up-or-down vote— in order to achieve a unpopular partisan objective. This is highly disturbing and in some ways, dangerous. The American people do not want this health care bill and they certainly don’t want the democratic process turned on its head in an effort to pass it over their objections.”
Committee on Rules Republicans
*1627 Longworth House Office Building
*202-225-9191