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Comment by sethg | Hacker News Reader

The Constitution states (Article I, Section 5) that “Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings”, and even though the self-executing rule strikes me as a way to hack parliamentary procedure, every member who votes for that bill will know what its effect will be.

Also, the Republicans had no aversion to using self-executing rules back when they were in power. (http://mediamatters.org/research/201003150041)

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Self-executing rules may have issues, certainly, but this is the first time I've heard a fuss being made about that part of the Slaughter rule.

Everyone else is focusing on the prospect of the House "deeming" the Senate bill as being passed without actually voting on it. If you look at the actual "Right Wing Media" words that are quoted by Media Matters, you'll see that none of them include "self-executing".

This is an attempt at misdirection that doesn't hold up to even minimal examination.

Look at the quote from the CRS report:

This means that when the House adopts a rule it also simultaneously agrees to dispose of a separate matter, which is specified in the rule itself. For instance, self-executing rules may stipulate that a discrete policy proposal IS DEEMED TO HAVE PASSED THE HOUSE and been incorporated in the bill to be taken up. The effect: neither in the House nor in the Committee of the Whole will lawmakers have an opportunity to amend or to vote separately on the "self-executed" provision. It was automatically agreed to when the House passed the rule.

That report is from 2006.

You still need to come up with an example where the final language for a bill was "deemed" passed without actually being voted on. As far as I can tell from these excerpts, they apply to the process prior to final passage.

ADDED: if the Republicans had "deemed" the final language of a bill as being passed without actually holding a vote on it don't you think the Democrats would still be screaming about how they had "shredded the Constitution!" etc. etc.?

I’m really not enough of a politics junkie to know when this maneuver was used for the final language of a bill and when it was used for something else. It seems clear to me, however, that if the maneuver is constitutionally OK for one kind of House resolution, it’s OK for every kind of resolution.

Nothing is being “passed without actually being voted on”. There will be one vote, which will simultaneously have two effects: one described by the procedural rule, and one described in the text of the bill itself. Every Representative who votes on the bill will be perfectly aware of those two effects and can choose to vote yea or nay accordingly. And then the majority will rule, which is more than we get from the Senate.

OK, but I think it would be best to focus on the point that your opponents are arguing about, a final up or down vote on the final language of a bill, and not the red herring of how the sausage that comprises that bill has been made.

Especially in the current context where everyone has had a chance to analyze the 2,700 pages of the Senate bill that was passed ~ 2.5 months ago.

edit: Oops, was wrong about the jobless bill, n/m

Newt and Hastert have also made extensive use of this provision as well. It's tough to dig up news items on it as it wasn't controversial back in the day. Hastert was particularly keen on using it and the zenith of Bush's unpopularity as it allowed him to shield the president's massively unpopular legislation from house votes.

Sometimes when a system is broken, hacking is the only way of getting something useful out of it.

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