Confused about procedural wrangling on the healthcare overhaul? You are not alone

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If you’re confused about the parliamentary wrangling over healthcare, relax. The lawmakers are confused too.

Forget partisan animosity -- or at least put it aside for the moment. Legal procedures have their own special steps, even when, as one of Charles Dickens’ characters noted, the law is an ass.

The complexity of making law was nowhere more clear than in the Saturday debate in the Rules Committee about what exactly was the procedure for passing the current version of healthcare overhaul.

President Obama’s plan was built on the healthcare version that passed the Senate last Christmas, along with numerous amendments needed to make the bill politically palatable to House Democrats.

Because Senate Democrats no longer have a workable supermajority of 60, the amendments must be in the form of a reconciliation bill, which requires just 51 votes for passage.

To accommodate the politics in both houses, Democrats are working toward a plan to have a rule that incorporates the Senate version of the bill along with the reconciliation package of amendments.

The current plan is for the committee to approve the rule and send the whole package to the full House, which will vote on the rule on Sunday. There will be no need to debate the policy in the Senate bill, which will be deemed to have passed if the rule is approved.

Then the House will debate and vote on the reconciliation package, which, if passed, goes to the Senate for consideration.

Republicans hate the ‘deemed to have passed’ move, which they argue allows Democrats to hide their vote on the Senate bill. Democrats retort that the vote on the rule will be equivalent to voting on the Senate bill, so they will be politically accountable.

Still, there are some sticking points.

“Let’s assume we pass a rule that deems Senate bill passed, then we are going to debate the reconciliation package,” Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) said Saturday. “While we’re debating the reconciliation package, is the president of the United States going to sign this bill, that we just deemed passed?

“If he doesn’t, it ain’t a law,” Barton said “I don’t think it is law anyway.”

“He is going to sign the Senate bill,” argued Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), though it was unclear how quickly President Obama would have to act.

“I don’t know how much time he will have between the rule vote,” said Barton noting that the House leadership was planning to pass the reconciliation package hours later.

“The president of the United States has to sign something unless ya’ll change that in the rule too,” Barton snapped.

Saying the discussion was hypothetical, committee Chairwoman Rep. Louis Slaughter (D-N.Y.) shut down the discussion because members had to go vote on the House floor.

-- Michael Muskal

Twitter.com/LATimesmuskal