blaming the current crisis in the financial industry

[darrels joy]

How a Bill Becomes a Law

A Constitution Day lesson for the DailyKos Kidz.

By JAMES TARANTO

yesterday's column we noted that some supporters of Barack Obama, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, were blaming the current crisis in the financial industry on the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (http://banking.senate.gov/conf/), a law whose chief Senate sponsor was then-Sen. Phil Gramm, who until July was an adviser to John McCain's presidential campaign. (The chief House sponsor was then-Rep. Jim Leach, now co-founder of Republicans for Obama.)

This was curious, we noted, since Graham-Leach-Bliley passed the Senate on a 90-8 vote, with both Reid and Obama running mate Joe Biden casting "aye" votes. One Andre Neil, a contributor to the Angry Left Web site DailyKos.com, thought he had caught us in an error--or, as he put it, "James Taranto is a liar. The Wall Street Journal just allowed one of its staff to perpetuate a blatant lie on its behalf." There followed a flood of angry spam from dozens of DailyKos readers; to get a sense of the tone, click on Neil's name and peruse the comments.

Trouble is, it is Neil who has misled his readers. He claims that the page to which we linked "is not a transcript to the roll call for the bill":

This is. It took place on May 6, 1999. The page that Taranto linked to was a vote on the conference report, which took place 6 months after the bill had already passed in the senate, and just over a week before it was signed into law. The bill was not passed 90-8; it was passed 54-44, almost strictly down party lines.

Neil and most of his readers do not seem to know what a conference report is. As a public service on this Constitution Day, we therefore present a lesson for DailyKos readers (and anyone else who could use a refresher) in How a Bill Becomes a Law:

America has what is known as a bicameral (two-chamber) legislature. In order for a bill to become a law, it must command a majority of voting members in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. A bill that has the support of only one chamber is a legal nullity. This much you could have learned by watching "

Schoolhouse Rock" target="_blank">Schoolhouse Rock

," which seems to be where the Kos Kidz' education ended. In real life, though, things are a bit more complicated.

The way the process works is that before voting on a bill, each chamber debates it separately, considering and voting on amendments (changes) introduced by members. The result in many cases is that by the time the House and Senate each vote on a bill, it become two different bills: one that passed the House and one that passed the Senate. Since each bill has passed only one chamber of Congress, neither one can become a law.

Enter the conference committee. This is a group of representatives and senators who meet to hash out the differences between the House and Senate bills. They produce a compromise: a bill on which both houses vote, so that it can become a law. The bill that actually becomes a law is known as a "conference report."

This is what happened with Gramm-Leach-Bliley. The Senate-only version of the bill did pass on May 6, 1999 by a near-party-line vote of 54-44.

The House-only version passed, 343-86, on July 1. Neither of these bills, however, became a law. The bill that did become a law--the law about which Sen. Reid and others are complaining now--was the conference report, the bill the Senate approved by 90-8 on Nov. 4. The House passed it the same day, 362-57.

Neil seems to have mistakenly thought that the "conference report" was a mere procedural action, when in fact it was a vote on actual legislation.

One of his readers tried to clear up his confusion but failed, as evidenced by Neil's response:

Update 3: I'm seeing a lot of comments about the significance of Democrats having voted for the Conference Report. I'll just go ahead and repost my reply to robertacker13:

"The Conference Report is nothing but an editing session. During the session, a a team picked from both the House and Senate meet in order to reconcile differences between the versions of the bills already passed in both chambers. This is the reason it took from May until November to get the bill passed. This is the reason GLBA passed that 4 November vote with such an overwhelming majority--it had already been approved in both houses, and the only formality left was for language to be amended by the conferees.

The 4 November vote was not a vote on the merits of the bill. It was a vote on the language of the bill.

Blocking the conference report does not kill a vote. Even if the report was voted against by every last Democrat, it was going to get pushed through anyway."

In fact, had the Senate voted down the conference report, the legislation would have been dead, since the bill that previously passed the Senate was different from the one that passed the House. Neil's distinction between the "merits" and "language" of the bill lacks any basis in reality. A bill and its language are one and the same thing.

Moreover, Neil errs in implying that the Republicans could have passed Gramm-Leach-Bliley without Democratic help. It is true that the Republicans held majorities in both congressional chambers in 1999. Yet as hard as it may be to believe now, the president, Bill Clinton, was a Democrat. It was Clinton's signature that made the bill a law. Clinton could have refused to sign ("That's called a veto," as "Schoolhouse Rock" teaches).

In that case, it would have taken a two-thirds vote in both houses to make the bill a law--which means the votes of 34 Democratic senators would have been sufficient to block the legislation. Between May and November, 37 Democrats, including Reid and Biden, switched from opposing Gramm-Leach-Bliley to supporting it. Had 27 or more of them stood their ground, their numbers would have been sufficient to sustain a veto.

In fairness to Neil and the other Kos Kidz, it's probably true that hardly anyone knows what a conference report is. Yet while their ignorance may be excusable, the self-righteousness and bluster with which they express it ought to embarrass even Markos Moulitsas.

Several readers called to our attention two other points relevant to our item yesterday. First, it seems Peter Fitzgerald, the Republican who preceded Obama in the Senate, voted "present" because his father was in the banking business and thus the senator believed it was a conflict of interest for him to vote on legislation affecting the industry.

Second, without Gramm-Leach-Bliley, which abolished the barrier between commercial and investment banking, the recent deals that saved Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch would have been impossible, since both of them involved a commercial bank acquiring a troubled investment bank.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122167514301648581.html