Partisan Divide Alive and Well in Finance

Thanks for this reporting, Kate Pickert.

Thanks, Kate. Keep up the good work. Can Baucus make the Sergeant at Arms enforce a no leaving the chamber / no potty breaks / no cigs rule until all votes are in? That might speed things up.

Thanks for pitching in on this, Kate. Hope we haven’t been too rough on you.

“Lost in Translation Moment: Several Republicans said, in the interest of “transparency,” the committee should not vote on a bill until they have full “legislative language,” the complicated legalese only decipherable by a tiny fraction of Americans.”
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Bias much? Of course, having the full language would allow the people who do understand the “legalese” to explain the implications of the bill to those who do not.

For spob –
No bias at all. Perhaps you didn’t get a chance to watch. This committee writes the bill in “human” language and then it is written in legalese. So, most Americans can understand the bill as it is first written by the committee.

There is no reason to “wait three weeks or so” until the “human version” is translated to the legalese version – which you rightly state not many can understand.

So, you see, there is no need for the lobbyists and obstructionists to “translate” to us mere mortals.

The legalese is what counts.

Spob, this from Ezra Klein:

“There’s an interesting — well, sort of interesting — debate going on at the Finance Committee’s mark-up right now. Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) has an amendment forcing the Senate Finance Committee to delay its vote until a final CBO score of the final legislative language is available. This would essentially delay a vote for three weeks: First the so-called “conceptual language” has to be converted into legislative language. Then the legislative language has to undergo a two- to three-week final scoring process.

This has never been demanded in the history of the Finance Committee.

I imagine this amendment will fail, and I’ll update the post when I know for sure. But I was struck by Kent Conrad’s rejoinder to the argument that the “conceptual language” is insufficient.

What is conceptual language? It’s plain English. Plain English. I’m not a lawyer. We write our bills in plain English so the members can understand them, and so the public can understand them. Conceptual language is much more transparent. To most people, legislative language is gobbledy-gook.
That’s absolutely correct. It’s to the Finance Committee’s credit that they begin by writing their bills in plain English. Other committees should follow suit. It not only allows the public to follow along, but it allows the members to follow along.”

The most striking thing is that, if Ezra is correct, this has never, ever, been done in the Senate Finance Committee before. One wonders why the republicans are now insisting on this? Alright, one doesn’t wonder so much as one knows precisely why they are doing it.

Yes, the the GOP Senators urgently need additional time to read the bill in legalese before they absolutely, positively wont vote for it. Got it.

Incidentally, I don’t have a problem with the GOP’s tactics, even if I am 1000% against them on policy. If they want to try lard up the bill with poison pills, delaying procedural rules, and ideological grandstanding provisions, they can knock themselves out.

But I am under no obligation to treat their efforts as serious.

I did watch that entire debate, and spob is right in this case.
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Pickert is misrepresenting (either deliberately, or through gross ignorance) the GOP argument in this case. Republicans want to know what the bill will cost, and that can accurately be assessed only by “scoring” based on the actual legislative language. Additionally, the GOP wants it to be possible for the lawyers of stakeholders to determine the implications (and potential implications) of the legislative language.
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Both are perfectly valid concerns IMHO.
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But lets face it, the expression of these concerns seem to have far more to do with delaying a vote past the (supposed) reconciliation deadline than with the arguments themselves. But the fault there lies with Baucus and the White House — they determined the timing here, and rushing through a bill without full consideration of its impact in order to meet an ‘artificial’ deadline is not justified simply because the GOP’s intent is obstruction rather than passage of the best bill possible.
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This whole thing is Kabuki anyway, insofar as everyone acknowledges that the Finance bill will never be brought up for consideration by the senate, but will instead form the bases of some kind of “compromise” with the HELP bill that will be negotiated behind closed doors before being presented to the Senate.

Well, Ezra is dead wrong, because the “conceptual” language (and its not ‘plain english’) is a 30 year old convention developed to address questions of the tax code.
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Legislative language consists mostly of amendments to existing statutory language — in other words, unless you have the original statutory language handy, the legislative language is usually meaningless.
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But “conceptual” language is far different from “plain english”, because “conceptual language” still contains an enormous amount of jargon and obscure references to existing legislation that can disguise the intent and/or effect of a law.
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for instance, here is some “conceptual language” from the Baucus bill…
Chairman’s Mark
The Chairman‘s Mark would allow a cafeteria plan to offer as a qualified benefit contributions to a qualified long-term care insurance contract (as defined in section 7702B) to the extent the amount of such contributions does not exceed the eligible long-term care premiums (as defined in section 213(d)(10)) for such contract.

yeah well Pluk, nothing you’ve said indicates that ezra was wrong in saying that this is the first time this has been done in the senate finance committee; care to elaborate?

You may not agree with the idea of scoring conceptual language but that’s really not the point here; the point is that republicans are again moving the goalposts for their own ulterior motives.

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/09/23/2078308.aspx
The practice at the Senate Finance Committee during the past 30 years — under both the leadership of Democrats and Republicans — is that the committee votes on bill using “conceptual language,”…
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yeah well Pluk, nothing you’ve said indicates that ezra was wrong in saying that this is the first time this has been done in the senate finance committee; care to elaborate?

You may not agree with the idea of scoring conceptual language but that’s really not the point here; the point is that republicans are again moving the goalposts for their own ulterior motives.
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well, obviously, if the Senate Finance Committee wasn’t using conceptual language 31 years ago, this isn’t the first time that a bill from the committee has been voted on using legislative language.
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and while I agree that the “point” here is GOP obstruction, Pickert is misrepresenting the (absolutely valid) arguments being used by the GOP in order to accomplish that obstruction — and its that misrepresentation that I find objectionable.
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Indeed, were it not for the “reconciliation deadline”, the Dems would probably not be so adamant about not having the actual language available before voting on the bill.
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The bottom line here is that there is very little difference between what goes on in finance, and the rest of the committees. Senators don’t read legislative language, they read the summaries of legislation that are prepared for the Senate (and its committees) by the Senate staff, as well as summaries prepared for them by their own staffs. And those summaries are often closer to “plain english” than the “conceptual language” used by the Finance committee.
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As for goalpost moving, the Dems are trying to rush through a bill for a very bad reason — and the GOP are trying to stop the bill for equally bad reasons. The Baucus bill is (as that “union boss” described it) “Bullsh*t”, and what is now going on should have been done months ago in the Health subcommittee of the Finance Committee under Rockefeller’s leadership, and not by the whole committee under Baucus’s gavel.
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Baucus ignored the appropriate procedures in order to maintain personal control, and now he (and the Dems who enabled him) are dealing with the consequences.

Perhaps Kate could weigh in here . . . .

http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/09/a_novel_idea_give_congress_a_c.asp

The bottom line here is that there is very little difference between what goes on in finance, and the rest of the committees. Senators don’t read legislative language, they read the summaries of legislation that are prepared for the Senate (and its committees) by the Senate staff, as well as summaries prepared for them by their own staffs. And those summaries are often closer to “plain english” than the “conceptual language” used by the Finance committee.
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I don’t understand what you are saying here. What does this have to do with the validity of the GOP complaints? They want official legislative language so they can get an official score from the CBO. Yet the CBO said they can give a quick score, which should be give the GOP plenty of information to judge the cost of the bill. You don’t need the official results in formal writing to get an understanding of the bills impacts. Do you really think any of them would vote for the bill once they recieved an official CBO score? They have no intention of voting for it anyway so their complaints are nothing more than delay tactics.
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Conceptual language should be enough for a committee vote. The committee has done it this way for 30 years. If they really wanted it to be different, they had 30 years to change the process. GOP complaints on the lack of legislative language are obstructionism and not to be taken seriously. It seems to me like you are criticising Baucus here just because you don’t like his bill.

Pluk,
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It is exactly this type of Kabuki theater that people are sick of and that nobody in the media talks about!
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We know that there are shenanigans going on in D.C.
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When will a courageous voice (probably not a journalistic stenographer) stand up for the people and yell it to the rooftops (like but Joe Wilson, but with factual support) that the shindig is over!!!
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We’re Mad As Hell and we ain’t going to take it no more. Give the people what they are asking for or we’ll storm Washington and just take it!

If you would like to be taken seriously on a policy issue, citing The Weekly Standard is probably not the best way to go. Their record for accuracy is documentably poor.

I don’t understand what you are saying here. What does this have to do with the validity of the GOP complaints?
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What I was saying there was not about the validity of the GOP arguments, it was about the whole Kabuki of the legislative process.
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