Obama Wins with Trickery

President Obama won three major victories in one week: tax reform, strengthening the rights of homosexuals in the military and renewal of the START Treaty. How did he do it?

Last week, Barack Obama proved himself to have a talent for public deal making. Within a single week, he pushed through the nation’s biggest tax reform deal, renewal of the START Treaty and legislation ending a practice that discriminated against homosexuals in the military. In one of those, he managed it in the Senate, once considered to be the death chamber of legislation.

One frustrated parliamentarian recently remarked that it was much harder to get legislation through the Senate than it was to kill it there: Up to year’s end, the Democratic House of Representatives had proposed hundreds of laws since Obama’s inauguration that weren’t even taken up in the 100-member Senate. Laws there require a minimum of 60 votes for passage; in some cases, the Constitution mandates a two-thirds majority.

Laws in the United States begin life mainly in the House of Representatives, but many of them fail because they’re never even taken up by the Senate. In that case, it boils down to a change in the proposed law’s text. It goes back to the House, where a reconciliation committee comes up with new wording. This process alone can take months.

Obama ran into this situation with his heart’s desire, health care reform legislation. He was able to salvage the legislation by using a trick. The Senate can pass emergency legislation without the 60-vote supermajority, provided it affects the treasury. The Obama administration simply declared the health care reform legislation to be budgetary legislation, whereby it could be passed with a simple 51-vote majority.

There’s no mystery why Obama wants to get a new START Treaty ratified before the Christmas recess: Democrats still hold 58 of the 100 seats in the Senate. After the midterm election defeat, however, that majority will shrink to 53 when the new Congress is seated in January. But that makes little real difference. As long as the Democrats lack a supermajority to pass legislation, conservatives can debate newly proposed laws to death by filibustering.