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Scroll to the bottom to get Michael Hammond’s current take on stopping Reid-Care in the Senate.

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“‘Republican members oppose the bill, but they don’t appear willing to stay up nights arguing against it,’ one former Hill staffer told me.” – John Fund

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund pointed out in his “Health Care Payola” - -

“. . .Republicans are drawing a line at some of the more aggressive dilatory parliamentary tactics open to them”

explaining - -

“On the Republican side, Mr. Reid must be relieved the GOP has apparently decided not to force a reading of the entire 2,074-page bill over the weekend. Instead, Republicans will settle for a full day of debate before the Saturday night vote.

Republicans had the option of staying on the floor and having Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and others read the bill, a process that would take at least two days. They opted for a less strenuous path that will allow them to spend plenty of time at home during the Thanksgiving holiday.” (Underscoring Forum’s.)

Joseph Curl of the Washington Times had also reported on this parliamentary possibility last Friday - -

“The 2,074-page Senate health care bill released this week by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would take at least 34 hours to read cover to cover - and that’s just what Sen. Tom Coburn wants done on the Senate floor.

The Oklahoma Republican has threatened to force the Senate clerk (or more likely, a team of clerks), to read the massive bill before the full Senate moves to consider the legislation as expected on Saturday.”

. . . . .

“What’s even more interesting is that Senate Rule XIV, Paragraph 2, states that every bill and joint resolution ’shall receive three readings prior to its passage.’”

A Lost Opportunity on the ‘Stimulus’ Bill?

After the so-called ’stimulus’ package came back to the Senate from the House on Friday, February 13, we asked one parliamentary expert whether Republican leader senator Mitch McConnell then had an opportunity to insist that the bill be read. The expert told us - -

Such a request would have had to have been made by the Senate Republican leader just as the conference paper from the House was presented to the Senate. The chair might well rule against the leader, at which point the leader would make a constitutional point of order and ask for the ayes and nays.  This would be filibusterable, with two days of debate before the cloture vote and 30 hours of post-cloture debate.

This would have meant that on a Friday the Republican leader would ask that the conference report be read, and over the following weekend during the ensuing debate there could be a national protest about the fact that the report was not being allowed to be read as well as about the many surprises in that measure.

The national center-right has thundered that members of the Congress “read the bill” at least since the passage of the ’stimulus’ measure.

As a parallel action, reading a bill in full on the Senate floor, one that so fundamentally threatens American freedom, right into the Thanksgiving holidays would have

• raised national awareness to a peak,
  
• allowed voters to get a more measured take on how their own senators were about to vote,
  
• given everyone a sense of the incredible reach of the Democratic measure, and
• done the foregoing under national eyes.

The importance to conservatives of bringing the Senate Rules into play is well documented in this 2005 post on Human Events.

Mark Steyn warns repeatedly along these lines  -

“And the prize of permanent irreversible statist annexation merits the risk: Governmentalized ‘health care’ puts us on the fast track to Euro-sclerosis and redefines the relationship between citizen and state in ways that make genuine conservative politics all but impossible. Will the Senate stop it? And, if they don’t, will a post-2010 GOP Congress reverse it? The way they reversed, say, the federal Department of Education?” (Underscoring Forum’s.)

Is the GOP Senate Leadership On a Crisis Footing?

What can the Senate Republican chieftains be thinking when they back away from the opportunity to have a Senate line-by-line reading of a gargantuan measure changing the citizen’s traditional relation to the government?

Is the following, the intended message of the Senate Republican leadership?

“We live in our own bubble of incumbency, and we are sensitive only to whatever may be the widest consensus among Senate Republicans. Please don’t look to us for any Churchillian leadership.  We don’t do heroics - - and we are not sure what they would be anyway.”

As we all know, the first cloture vote on the consideration of Obamacare was approved on Saturday evening.

By way of contrast, RedState’s Erick Erickson had earlier declared (on November 10)  - -

“The GOP must not be afraid to shut down the Senate. The only acceptable victory is defeat of the legislation.”

Our question is whether the Senate Republican leadership can now muster enough true grit to bring Obamacare to a halt in that chamber.

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 Click here to get Michael Hammond’s current take on stopping Reid-Care in the U. S. Senate. (Hammond is a former general counsel to the Senate Republican Steering Committee.)

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