Yesterday, Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla) objected to waiving the reading of Senator Bernie Sanders massive 700+ page amendment to the current Baucus health care bill before the Senate. You see, ALL bills and amendments MUST be read aloud in the U.S. Senate unless the Senators give unanimous consent to waiving the reading. All it takes is one Senator to object and that is precisely what Senator Coburn did. That led to this awesome exchange between Senator Coburn and Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont).
Senator Sanders (I-VT) amendment was viewed by many as not being able to go really anywhere since the government-run public option had been taken off the table as well as the Medicare buy-in. Senator Coburn had warned about doing this last month and followed through on his threat.
However, when I got home last night and surfed over to C-SPAN, I was flummoxed to find out that the Senate stopped reading the amendment. I wondered why until I read Phillip Klein’s post about this over at American Spectator:
The Senate Republican leadership believes that the parliamentarian allowed Democrats to violate the rules of the Senate by allowing Sen. Bernie Sanders to cut off the reading of his single-payer proposal.
When an amendment is introduced, it has to be read on the Senate floor unless the rest of the Senate agrees to cut off the reading, and typically, the requirement is waived through “unanimous consent.” Yet today, Sen. Tom Coburn insisted that Sanders’ 767 page bill be read on the Senate floor, which was on pace to take more than 12 hours.
But about three hours into the reading, Sanders withdrew his amendment, and this stopped the reading of the bill — even without unanimous consent.
“In allowing Sanders to do that, it appears the parliamentarian has broken the standing rules of the Senate,” a Republican aide emails. “We’re looking into the implications of this and working on where to go from here.”
Here is the relevant part of Riddick’s Senate Procedure, which the GOP believes Democrats have violated, emphasis was in the email:
“Reading: Under Rule XV, paragraph 1, and Senate precedents, an amendment shall be read by the Clerk before it is up for consideration or before the same shall be debated unless a request to waive the reading is granted; in practice that includes an ordinary amendment or an amendment in the nature of a substitute, the reading of which may not be dispensed with except by unanimous consent, and if the request is denied the amendment must be read and further interruptions are not in order; interruptions of the reading of an amendment that has been proposed are not in order, even for the purpose of proposing a substitute amendment to a committee amendment which is being read. When an amendment is offered the regular order is its reading, and unanimous consent is required to call off the reading.” (Riddick’s Senate Procedure, P.43-44)”
“It looks like there’s nothing the Democrats aren’t prepared to do to jam this unpopular health care bill down the throats of the American public,” the aide writes.
AllahPundit over at HotAir wonders the following:
Assuming that’s [Medicare buy-in and the public option] been canceled due to Lieberman, does that mean we’re back to voting on the original Baucus bill?
[...]
Maybe we’ve actually reached the point where not only aren’t they reading the bill before voting on it, they’re not even writing it before voting on it.
HotAir has the video of Senator Cardin (D-Md), serving as President of the Senate, allowing Senator Sanders to withdraw the amendment as well as Senator McConnell’s response pointing out what Phillip Klein stated above.
