A Constitutional Slaughter Solution?

Yale’s Jack Balkin is now convinced that Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have found a constitutional way to combine passage of the Senate health care reform bill with revisions to be passed as part of a reconciliation process.  In a letter to House Rules Committee Chair Louise Slaughter (reproduced here) Balkin writes:

Under Article I, section 7 of the Constitution, a bill does not become a law until it is passed by both houses of Congress, presented to the President for his signature, and the President then signs the bill or otherwise allows it to become law without his signature. These are sometimes collectively referred to as the requirements of bicameralism and presentment.

In order to satisfy the requirements of bicameralism and presentment, the two houses must pass bills with identical language. Clinton v. City of New York, 524 U.S. 417 (1998).

As I understand it, the rule to be employed by the House for the consideration of the reconciliation measure will state that, upon passage of the reconciliation measure by the House, the House concurs in the amendments to H.R. 3590 passed by the Senate. This language means that the House agrees to pass the same language as the amended bill passed by the Senate.

If this is the case, then the language of this self-executing rule complies with the requirements of Article I, Section 7. The Constitution does not require that the House take a separate vote on the Senate amendments to H.R. 3590. Under Article I, Section 5, Clause 2, the Constitution gives the House of Representatives, like the Senate, the power to “determine the rules of its proceedings.” A rule which consolidates a vote on a bill and accompanying amendments, or, as in this case, a reconciliation measure and an amended bill, is within the House’s powers under Article I, Section 5, Clause 2.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Stanford’s Michael McConnell responds:

No one doubts that the House can consolidate two bills in a single measure; the question is whether, having done so, it may then hive the resulting bill into two parts, treating one part as an enrolled bill ready for presidential signature and the other part as a House bill ready for senatorial consideration. That seems inconsistent with the principle that the president may sign only bills in the exact form that they have passed both houses. A combination of two bills is not in “the same form” as either bill separately.

Defenders of the Democratic strategy say that a self-executing rule has been used many times before by both parties. But never in this way. Most of the time a self-executing rule is used to incorporate amendments into a pending bill without actual votes on the amendments, where the bill is then subject to a final vote by the House and Senate. That usage may be a dodge around House rules, but it does not violate the Constitution. I am not aware of any instance where a self-executing rule has been used to send one bill to the president for signature and another to the Senate for consideration by means of a single vote.

Self-executing rules have also been used to increase the debt ceiling by virtue of adopting a budget resolution. That procedure is questionable, but because budget resolutions are not laws, this usage does not have the feature of using one vote to send a bill to the president and at the same time to send a different bill to the Senate. There may have been other questionable uses of self-executing rules, but not often enough or in prominent enough cases to establish a precedent that would overcome serious constitutional challenge.

McConnell also addresses arguments that judicial review of the “Slaughter Solution” is precluded by Field v. Clark.  According to McConnell, “It is one thing for the Supreme Court to defer to Congress on questions of what Congress did, and quite another to defer to Congress on the meaning of the Constitution.”  While I don’t think the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is likely to accept this distinction (as I noted here), I think that it is a very serious argument, and one the Supreme Court might well accept.  (And, I should note, were the Supreme Court to accept this argument, I think it is unlikely that the Court would divide along traditional ideological lines, as this sort of question tends not to divide the Court in this way; see e.g. Clinton v. New York).

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