OK, so everyone who’s paying any attention knows that the House has forced a shutdown of the government, and that nothing is going to happen until Boener mans up and lets them pass a clean CR. But that clean CR would still need to be passed by the Senate, too, and last I checked, the Republicans still have more than 40 seats. If we do get a clean CR out of the House, is there any indication what the Senate plans to do? Can they filibuster it indefinitely? Will they? If they try to, is there any procedural way to get it through anyway?
Why would they? Senate Republicans are much more prone to appeasing Democrats than the House Republicans.
Per the Post:
Senate Dems to call GOP’s bluff on debt limit
Among others, there’s the open question of whether a republican would successfully filibuster and whether that would trigger a rules change. The article has a tiny bit of analysis regarding the filibuster, but there’s not much to go on.
There’s the ignorant (willful or diehard; ends in the same place) that have somehow convinced themselves/been told that the shutdown is a Democrat thing. I wonder how contorted the logic will get if the Republicans fillibuster or otherwise balk at a a Senate clean CR.
The OP is discussing the CR, your article is about the debt limit hike. They’re two different issues.
As top the OP, the Senate already passed a clean CR. There was an attempt by Cruz to filibuster it*, but he didn’t have the votes, and so he settled for just talking for a long time before the bill came up for a vote.
I think that was the only chance to filibuster the bill. If it passes the House as is, it can go straight to Obama, if the House passes it with modifications, it can go through the Senate via reconciliation and won’t be subject to a filibuster.
*(he actually tried to filibuster the House bill, which had the language he wanted in it, since once it passed the language would be amended out and it could be passed as a clean CR without any further chance for the minority to block it).
OK, so the bill that passed the Senate originated as a “dirty” House CR, which the Senate then cleaned and passed, thus satisfying the requirement that it originate in the House? And presumably, a clean CR is simple enough that if the House passes a new one, they’ll match, and can go straight to the President (or, if they disagree on some trivial detail, the Senate will presumably pass the new one, too, given that they already passed one).
Comes of being in the minority and knowing it.
All the House has to do is vote on the Senate-passed CR, and if it passed without further amendments, will be sent directly to the President.
If the House amends it, it would go back to the Senate either to be passed, or it could be subject to even more amendments.
I think they can pass a changed bill through Reconciliation without having it be subject to a filibuster. But even if that’s not true its pretty unlikely that the Senate GOP would filibuster a CR that managed to get through the much more intransigent House.
No, that’s incorrect. That’s not how reconciliation works. Any amendments to the House-passed bill are subject to the normal rules of the Senate.
I think we’re saying the same thing. By “changed bill” I mean if the House makes changes from the clean CR the Senate already passed, the Senate can pass that bill via Reconciliation.
If the House passes a bill and the Senate wants to make changes, then that could be filibustered. This is obviously true since it already happened, Cruz tried to mount a filibuster against the bill the Senate planned to strip the defending of Obamacare out of.
Reconciliation is a budget process that allows changes to taxes and entitlements to be exempted from filibuster. There is no reconciliation process in place that would apply to this bill in any circumstances.
What you may be referring to is conference committees, where the House and Senate appoint conferees to come to agreement on differing provisions of bills. Then each house has to vote on the negotiated changes, but the bill (including changes thereto) can still be filibustered in the Senate.
Also comes from some of the loonier Tea Party candidates for the Senate getting their asses handed to them last election.