Republicans Halt Ethics Legislation

The line-item veto could have been killed by Democrats voting against it. No need to sacrifice ethics reform to do so.

It was never an attachment. An attachment is a rider that's attached to the bill so that you have to vote for both or neither. That was never the case here. The GOP was insisting on have a separate vote on the line-item veto bill and wouldn't allow a vote on the ethics measure unless there was also a vote on the line-item measure. Dems did the same thing many times last year. All minority parties do this in order to get their bills to a vote.

The leaders of both parties had an agreement in place. In the Senate, those types of agreements hold up because there are enough people committed to the integrity of the Senate to make it work. They only needed 9 GOP votes to get the bills to a vote and the leadership could easily produce this.

Byrd killed it, and the Dems didn't stop him. Leaders from both parties had a plan in place to get votes on both bills, and it was the Democratic side that prevented that from happening. There's no way around that.

Ethics reform is something that has to happen at the beginning of a power shift, because those in power generally don't want it and it can only be done by people who just came into power and haven't been corrupted yet. We had a unique opportunity here and unless it gets revived, this is a major failure on the part of Dems.

 

OK, instead of attached, let's say linked.

And again, Why didn't the Republicans simply allow the Ethics Bill to be voted on and take up the Veto measure later? It's because they didn't care about the Veto measure except to use it as a poison pill to kill the Ethics Bill they didn't want. Blame Byrd if you want, but who exactly created the situation where Byrd could single-handedly have this much power? That's right, the Repubs... and they did it intentionally.

And to your argument that this is how the minority gets bills considered, you're telling me that of all the bills Republicans want to pass on ethics and budget reform and earmark reform, etc., this dog of a bill is the most important one? Please. You're smarter than that.

 

Hmmmm... I may have been wrong... let's see what happens...

 

I fully agree with that - but I expect the GOP to do stuff like that. I was disappointed that the Democrats allowed it. As it turns out, Byrd apparently relented, and they did make a deal, and the ethics bill passed 96-2 yesterday. I just think it was silly to play chicken with such an important bill. Other bills can be passed anytime. Ethics legislation like this has to be done right after a election & change of power because otherwise it gets forgotten and/or loses support.

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My argument is that this was a great opportunity for the GOP to get one of their more controversial bills considered by linking it to a relatively popular measure that most people wanted passed.

If it was done as a poison pill, the GOP leaders wouldn't have agreed to what they did - to have the opportunity to bring it up alongside the next bill to be considered. Basically, it was a negotiating tool for the GOP and the GOP managed to get their bill considered as a result of it. To me, that's a small price to pay to get the ethics bill passed. I would have been disappointed if the Dem Senate was so petty to trash ethics reform in order to not even allow discussion on the GOP bill.

 

The House should bring the bill back up again and get it passed. Now that the Senate has passed a bill, they can cut the line item BS out of it in conference committee.




D&D. A Conference is more than One Person Talking.

 

The line item veto isn't in the ethics bill.

 

Then I must be missing something. They should still pass another ethics bill and hammer it out in conference.




D&D. Bills aren't all Green.

 

That's why I thought this was all so silly. The GOP was never trying to attach the line item veto to this whether you had to vote for neither or both. All they wanted was a chance to get the line item veto to the floor as a separate vote. Dems finally agreed and its going to be considered next week sometime. That's why I was so disappointed when it looked like the Dems were going to scrap the ethics bill to not even allow the line-item discussion.

The Senate ethics bill, I believe, is more strict than the House one, so they do still need to go to conference and figure out what the final one will be, but that should be relatively easy stuff given that the vote was fairly strong in the House and overwhelming (96-2) in the Senate.

 

This kind of casts doubt on the "Republicans were trying to kill the bill" crowd.