Will House and Senate Democrats convene a conference committee to hash out differences between their healthcare bills? Or will the House simply vote on the Senate version and be done with it? Jon Cohn says it’s going to be neither — and both:
According to a pair of senior Capitol Hill staffers, one from each chamber, House and Senate Democrats are “almost certain” to negotiate informally rather than convene a formal conference committee….“There will almost certainly be full negotiations but no formal conference,” the House staffer says. “There are too many procedural hurdles to go the formal conference route in the Senate.”
….“I think the Republicans have made our decision for us,” the Senate staffer says. “It’s time for a little ping-pong.”
“Ping pong” is a reference to one way the House and Senate could proceed. With ping-ponging, the chambers send legislation back and forth to one another until they finally have an agreed-upon version of the bill. But even ping-ponging can take different forms and some people use the term generically to refer to any informal negotiations.
If this turns out to be true, then presumably one chamber or the other will pass the renegotiated bill and then send it directly to the other chamber. At least, that seems more likely to me than literally ping-ponging the bill back and forth several times.
In any case, this seems like a reasonable plan. Republicans have made it clear that they plan to erect every possible procedural hurdle they can think of, even including objections to routine things like naming conference committee members. So, since they’ve plainly given up on trying to influence the bill itself and are merely trying to obstruct and delay, there’s really no reason why Democrats shouldn’t play by the same rules and try to avoid obstruction any way they can. Congress has other things to do, after all, and spending weeks playing procedural games with Republicans keeps them from getting to it. It’s time to put healthcare to bed and start spending time on climate change, financial regulation, and the 2011 budget instead. Enough’s enough.
