deem and pass

I had an amusing conversation over this during a break in the basketball action yesterday. For whatever reason, this has become a darling effect to nullify the coming health care bill for conservatives. My understanding, from reading a series of legal blogs on the topic, is that it's unlikely to get to the Supremes, but even if it did, it's not entirely clear that they would or could overturn it on this basis. In fact, it's probably the quickest way to get a challenge to the bill thrown out of the court system. Basically the courts have a standing precedent which ruled that the process by which a bill is passed by the legislature isn't really in their purview to overturn so long as the legislature's proper authorities have signed off on the process being used. Basic provisions in the bill are more likely to get challenged on their Constitutionality with some seriousness rather than the methods of passage.

I'm not a big fan of the bill as final result (they still nixed HSAs and still nixed the possibility of using taxation on expensive health care plans to moderate their use; ie waste, in order to mollify a favoured demographic base in the unions). But the level of vitriol aimed at it gets amusing. "They've never done this before". Uh. Actually they have. As recently as 2005. Republicans passed what amounted to two different bills on the same thing too (which is what deem and pass results in), on that thing which we claim to hate most: they raised the national debt ceiling this way. The Gingrich Congress, followed by Hastert's, was notorious for passing bills this way. The talk machine has managed, as usual, to ignore this portion of history.

Glazing over history means you are doomed to repeat it.