Snark FAIL
McClatchy has the details: Congress invokes ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ in debate, but misquotes it
“Since the dawn of the republic, these are how differences are settled between the House and Senate,” Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, said on the House floor. “If you don’t remember your civics 101, maybe if you have small children like I do, you can go back and watch the ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ video. It’s very clear.”
The subject of the ‘conference committee’ is not discussed in the US Constitution, Civics 101, or ‘Schoolhouse Rock’. It was created after the fact, not at the ‘dawn of the republic’, in a procedural agreement between the two Houses. In the early days Congress was small enough that there was no need to have committees, or most of the current organizational structure of Congress.
3 comments
You can tell Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas was edumcated in those fine Texas schools, must have been a classmate of Rick “The Dumbass” Perry.
My reading of the Constitution and the proceedings surrounding the creation of the House and Senate is that the founders felt that certain bills should originate in the House, certain bills should originate in the Senate, then the other house of Congress vote for or against the bill *as written*. This notion of each branch going it alone on a given bill, voting for their bill, then getting together to put two entirely different bills together into a single bill then voting *again* on the Frankenstein result of putting a Senate head on a House body with Senate legs without any debate allowed, simply isn’t anywhere in the Constitution or in the discussions by the Founders regarding Congress. If the founders thought of conference committees at all, it was as something that happened *during* the writing of the bill by whichever house of Congress was writing the bill… “say, this is a bill that we think would be good, would you guys vote for it?”
On the other hand, that process clearly would not work today, you aren’t going to poll 400+ House members while writing a bill to make sure it’s going to get enough support to pass *before* the Senate passes it. And if it’s not going to pass the House, the Senate voting on it is a waste of time. Just another reason why our bicameral legislative body at the national level is a complete and total failure, it might have worked at a time of a much slower pre-Internet world but in today’s fast-moving world it simply is incapable of functioning fast enough to be relevant. By the time you go through all the committees and conferences and such, whatever problem was intended to be solved is already either solved, or so dire that the solution proposed nine years ago that *finally* passed today is like putting a band-aid on a gushing head wound — just futile.
Frankly, Dave, more and more states have been dropping civics from their requirements for graduation, and ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ has actually been used as part of the program for new Congresscritters. The number of people who actually know how the legislative process works any more, when it works, is diminishing in this country.
Abraham Lincoln doubled the White House staff from one secretary to two during the Civil War, Badtux, so most of the government we have today is of recent vintage, not ‘since the dawn of the republic’.
Back when Congress was a part-time job by under a hundred people who lived in boarding houses for a couple of months, things were created by consensus, occasionally over dinner at the boarding houses. Everyone knew each other, so bills were usually agreed on before they were actually presented for a vote.
Once the volume of legislation ramped up and Congress expanded with the country, things had to change. What’s the point of being a committee chair in either House if you can write laws to benefit your voters and your campaign contributors? All it took to bring things to a screeching halt was the loss of civility pioneered by Newt ‘Efting’ Grinch when he became Speaker.
The Republicans seem to want to make every radical change they introduce into the system an instant ‘tradition’ that goes back ‘to the dawn of the republic’ and the obvious choice of the ‘Founding Fathers’, and thus, beyond question.
The biggest problem with the current bill under consideration is that Boehner doesn’t speak for the Republican majority, so there is no guarantee that his agreement has any real meaning. The reaction of the Senate Republicans makes it clear that he had given them assurances that the House would pass the Senate bill.
I think the votes for the Senate bill were there in the House, but the majority would have been Democratic votes, which is why the bill was never put to a vote.