Democrats Devise Trojan Horse to Advance “Voting Reform” Bill
“The strategy is the latest example of how Democrats are seeking new ways to try to bypass Senate procedures that are blocking their agenda.”
Democrats have figured out a way to sneak their “voting reform” bill into the House and then on to the Senate. It involves hollowing out a bill that has to do with NASA, and replacing the text with the text of their voting bill.
It’s not likely to change anything, but will force a debate on the topic which Democrats are probably hoping will pressure holdouts like Sens. Sinema (D-AZ) and Manchin (D-WV).
Alayna Treene reports at Axios:
Schumer finds loophole to advance elections reform package
Democratic leaders have found a mechanism to enable them to bypass an initial Republican filibuster and debate the party’s sweeping election reform bills, according to a new leadership memo obtained by Axios.
Why it matters: The strategy is the latest example of how Democrats are seeking new ways to try to bypass Senate procedures that are blocking their agenda. But the ultimate outcome will likely be the same: insufficient support to change the 60-vote threshold needed to pass sweeping voting rights reforms.
Driving the news: The House is expected to take up an amendment in the coming days related to NASA leasing “underutilized” property to private groups. Democratic leaders are referring to this as the “shell bill.”
- It will then strip that legislation of its existing language and replace it with the text for the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
- The House would then pass the updated bill and send it to the Senate as a “message.” Then, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) will file a motion to concur with the House amendment.
This is not the priority of the American people. It’s the priority of the Democrat Party. Grocery store shelves across the country are empty, the price of gas is higher than it has been in years, the southern border is wide open, and all the Democrats can talk about is imagined threats to “our democracy.”
Chuck Schumer is a man obsessed. Politico reports:
“The Senate will finally debate voting rights legislation, and then every senator will be faced with a choice of whether or not to pass the legislation to protect our democracy,” Schumer wrote in a memo, obtained by POLITICO, to Senate Democrats.
Schumer’s missive comes amid a torrent of activity among Senate Democrats to pass legislation cracking down on gerrymandering, making campaign finance reforms and creating national standards for early voting. President Joe Biden will attend a special caucus meeting with Senate Democrats Thursday as the party struggles over how and whether to weaken the filibuster to pass elections reform. And senators are furiously lobbying Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) to back off their opposition to weakening the 60-vote requirement.
Regarding the Democrats’ desire to trash the filibuster, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas delivered a speech on the Senate floor yesterday that was originally given by Chuck Schumer in 2005.
🚨 BREAKING: Chuck Schumer* speaks on the Senate floor in defense of the filibuster.
*Senator Cotton’s speech consisted entirely of Senator Schumer’s past statements. pic.twitter.com/zGfbpr7G5t
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) January 12, 2022
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Comments
Even if it gets to the floor for debate, the Dems still need 60 votes to end debate. They can’t get there.
And that’s why they’re doing all of this. They want to use this as a means to end the 60-vote threshold for passage of legislation in the same manner the 60-vote threshold for nominations was changed to a simple majority vote (which could be changed back to 60 next Wednesday if they wanted because it was a precedent change, not a rule change).
Sinema and Manchin want to keep the 60-vote threshold for legislation intact, and that’s the reason why this bill won’t go anywhere at this time. Sinema even said earlier today that she supports the legislation.
If you are wondering why there is little enthusiasm among Republicans to go after voter fraud, this may help:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/when_a_states_secretary_of_state_is_in_on_voter_fraud.html
Everyone IS doing it.
Shell bill for a shell president.
“Democrats devise Trojan horse to advance voting reform bill”
Biden is the original Trojan horse the Democrats used to get into the White House, Kamala is riding him and I have no idea who the hell is inside.
“cracking down on gerrymandering”
Definition of gerrymandering: When your opponent doesn’t design districts the way you want them.
This sounds like a violation of the Constitution: the Constitution requires both houses to actually vote on the bill. Once you’ve changed the bill it’s no longer what was voted on.
Of course, I realize this requires the courts to actually want to enforce the Constitution, and it therefore will not matter a whit….
The ‘concurrence’ of the Senate would be a vote. So it’s constitutional but unseemly and bound to fail.
Not if it’s a “vote” to simply accept whatever the House sends back. Only a vote on the actual bill would satisfy the Constitution, in my opinion.
What the house sends back is the bill. And the senate vote will be filibustered and therefore will not be held, so it will not pass.
In fact our State Supreme Court just declared the subterfuge illegal in my State, both by your stated rationale, as well as the informed debate laws setting forth legislative procedures. Laws and procedures, the Court stated, were not enacted to allow legislative slight of hand, but to inform and allow participation by the public.
What violation? To pass a bill, both houses must vote on the exact same version. The usual way legislation works is that each house passes its own version, then there’s a conference committee that works out a joint version, and that goes back to each house to be passed. Until that happens it is not passed and is not a law. So I don’t understand what you’re objecting to here.
Perfectly legal for the House to amend a bill and send it back to the Senate for consideration. That the democrats are stripping an existing bill of all content and replacing it with their bogus “election reform” bill is pretty nasty on their part, But is perfectly legal and the House rules allow such shenanigans to happen.. As long as the House democrats have the votes it’s a done deal. It’s just another sign of how desperate the democrats have gotten now that they realize that they are going to lose and lose big time when the 2022 midterm elections come around and that they have no real hope of keeping the White House in 2024.. If you think this is bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Actually happens all the time. For example, this is how the Senate is able to initiate revenue bills -they just take a junk bill from the House, and substitute in their own text. I ran into this awhile back, when I questioned the legitimacy of a Senate initiated revenue bill. Except that technically, it was initiated in the House, the original wording was stripped out, and replaced by the Senate verbiage. This actually works out better, because the House is typically under much tighter discipline than the Senate, and if both houses are controlled by the same party, passage is easier.
Isn’t that FRAUD ?
Of course. Congress and our bureaucracy is one huge criminal organization. How else can one explain the wealth of idiots like AOC going from pocket money to $2M in 2 years?
No, it is not fraud, it’s completely normal and standard procedure. There is no limit on the extent to which either house can amend a bill that is before it, so it can amend a bill by deleting all the words and replacing them with other words. That amended bill then has to go to the other house to be passed. A bill does not become law until both houses pass the exact same version.
Milhouse is correct that this is normal and standard procedure, to pass a bill with an amendment and ship it back to the other side of the building, and that side of the building must decide whether to accept it (concur), defeat it (not concur), or amend it again and send it right back. There is a term for it: ping-pong. The ping-pong is limited: It can happen something like three times before they hit the take it or leave it stage or have to call for a conference committee to sort out their differences.
Many states have the same mechanism. In Massachusetts, it’s called a “strike all.” In other states, “gut and replace.”
Some states have limitations on the process, for example, that whatever text replaces the old text, it has to be relevant and responsive to the original bill title. There’s a kerfuffle going on in Oregon right now over exactly this.
They will also use, “Strike all after the enacting clause and insert the following”.
I see that Milhouse is once again being downvoted for merely stating the what the law is. Naughty, naughty Milhouse.
Also…
This is not the priority of the American people.
So? I’m not concerned with the legislature flipping back and forth at the whim of the people. The Founders didn’t create a democracy for that very reason. Populism is not a good thing, in and of itself.
What I care about is whether or not it’s proper under the Constitution, whether it complies with laws already in effect (or specifically addresses them), and whether it’s the right thing to do.
Frankly, as shown by the number of people voting for Biden, and the fact that Schumer is still a Senator, the people are idiots.
The horse is part of the unsavory aftermath of Helen’s whoring around.
I’ve really had it with these dirtbags.
There’s an “America First” Republican running for US Rep in Alabama, in Fulbright’s old district.
When Ballotpedia asked him what politician he would most want to model himself after, he replied, “Preston Brooks.”
Brooks was an antebellum US Rep from SC, a “Suth’run gentleman” who took offense at a speech by Charles Sumner (R-MA) in which his cousin (also a senator) was slandered.
Advised that challenging Sumner to a duel was unseemly, as the alcoholic Yankee was not “of equal social class,” he instead entered the Senate Chambers and caned him unmercifully enough to put him out of commission for three years.
I have as of yet resisted this challenger’s frequent requests for campaign funds.
But I may yet be persuaded.
More specifically, Sumner hammered Brooks’s cousin for his support for slavery, and compared it to harlotry.
This was, to put it mildly, loaded language (since sexual misconduct between whites and slave blacks was a bit of a hot button topic).
Frankly, I’d prefer a politician who modeled himself after Calvin Coolidge.
Like almost everything else, this only speeds up the process of rejection of progressivism. (What will they call it next?) It’s going to become more unhinged, as they do the heavy lifting in their demise.
The message for anti-progressives is: Don’t screw it up and try not to make the same type mistakes. It’s a winning strategy for Americans.
Vermin Schumer will try anything to keep his job from AOC
Two can play that game.
Gut the bill, insert impeachment proceedings as “reconciliation” and send it back.
Actually, I don’t believe they could. Impeachments, like taxes, have to originate in the House.
But this bill did originate in the House, didn’t it? Or have I got that wrong?
But impeachment isn’t a bill at all. It’s a House resolution. Bills need to pass both houses and the president’s signature. Impeachments don’t; they’re internal proceedings of the House. So MrE’s idea wouldn’t work even if the Rs controlled the senate, which of course they don’t.
It was a Senate bill which the House took up, amended, and sent back to the Senate. It was done this way intentionally in order to skip a few procedural steps which could have been filibustered, including the motion to proceed. Because a House message, which is what this is, has a different procedural status there is no motion to proceed and they can go straight to it.
I’m simply proposing an unserious response to the Democrats unserious game playing.
Perhaps I should have suggested simply wrapping a fish with their damn bill and send it back to them?
I swear politics were baseball, the R’s would hide in their dugout every time the D’s clear the bench.
F–k ’em.
Psaki Refuses to Condemn Video from Iran’s Supreme Leader That Depicts the Assassination of President Trump:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/01/psaki-refuses-condemn-video-irans-supreme-leader-depicts-assassination-president-trump-video/
This is the d/prog version of failure theater. This allows one procedural vote to be skipped; the motion to proceed. That’s all. Next there is debate and other amendments offered and then a motion to end debate and vote on the bill. Any Senator can still filibuster the bill and it will still take 60 votes to break it.
Again this is Schumer attempting to appease the d/prog base with cool procedural maneuvers to show that they tried really hard but he needs more d/prog Senators so send money and vote for d/prog.
That’s my guess. I think Schumer is just posturing for the LIVs. He knows the Dems can’t offer Sinema or Manchin anything, and any RINO who votes for this crap is just cutting their own throat politically. So when they get smoked across the board in ’22, they can cry and say ‘We were the victims of evil Republicans suppressing the vote!’.
Senema has already said that her problem is with ending the filibuster, and not with HR-1. That said, she may change her mind, in response to the anger felt by her constituents over the theft of the Presidency and at least three Senate seats in November of 2020.
This is the same technique they used to pass O’BamaCare a decade ago. Max Baucus (D, MT) at the time proposed an amendment to strip the entirety of a bill that already made it out of the House and replace it with the 2,000+ page O’BamaCare legislation. This was an end run around the constitutional requirement for all spending bills to originate in the House. Cheers –
At the time, it was referred to as ‘Deem and Pass’; or demon-pass by some folks.