A Poisioned Primer on the Conference

A jaundiced look under the hood of the conference committee process from Matt Taibbi’s The Great Derangement:

The mechanism of the conference committee is a special voodoo all unto itself, a monstrously complex bureaucratic maze whose diabolical scheme is known to a select few congressional practitioners. But for the moment, only two facts are important.

The first is that the bill can again be completely rewritten here, rewritten from top to bottom, rewritten even so that it has a completely opposite meaning from the bills that passed the two houses – in a word, rewritten in such a fashion as to render the whole process up till now meaningless.

The second is that a majority vote of conference committee members, called “conferees,” is not even required for passage. Again, the conference committee chairs are the key players here. Whatever the top dogs from the House and Senate want generally occurs. They redo the bill according to whatever swinish commercial dynamic happens to govern this back-room deal (for the conference hearings are almost always conducted out of the public eye), then send the final version to a vote, again giving the members just a few hours’ notice before they make an essentially blind decision on the by-now completely revised legislation.

Industry lobbyists figured out long ago, Taibbi writes, that it’s cheaper to buy a couple of key conferees than a majority of the Congress. Don’t expect Matt’s Bush-era description of the process to change when the health care bills go to conference.

Given how tight the health care votes were in both the House and Senate, most bets are on the Senate bill being the governing document. That and the urgency the leadership feels to get this bill off their plates argue against the kind of wholesale changes the process described above suggests is possible. Howard Dean believes the bill could improve if some of the bad provisions get taken out, but doubts that the excised good stuff can be put back.

Keep a close eye out for who gets appointed to the conference committee. Leaning on those officials will be your last chance to influence the final details of the health care bill.