Boehnerâs âBipartisanâ Bunk
- Posted on November 7, 2014
House Speaker John Boehner exaggerates when he says âalmost allâ of the 46 âjobs billsâ awaiting action in the Senate âpassed the House on a bipartisan basis.â Exactly half of those bills got less than 20 Democratic votes, including two that got no votes and 12 others that got 10 or fewer votes. Thatâs out of 201 House Democrats.
Republicans, particularly House members, have been waging a
#StuckInTheSenate campaign for months. They blame gridlock on Senate Democrats for failing to take up legislation passed by the House. The number of bills âsitting on Harry Reidâs desk,â as Republicans are fond of saying, varies from person to person, ranging from a low of
278 (Rep. Patrick Meehan) to a ballpark figure of
300-plus (Sen. Roy Blunt) to a high of 387 (
Rep. Marsha Blackburn).
Now that the Republicans have won control the Senate, Boehner and other Republicans say the Senate will pass legislation that will get the country moving in the right direction. âWe have a majority in the U.S. Senate, where weâll move those 300 bills off Harry Reidâs desk finally and get a vote,â
Sen.-elect David Perdue said on election night.
Bipartisan âJobs Billsâ?
We will get to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reidâs cluttered desk in a minute, but letâs first deal with Boehnerâs specific claim about the â46 jobs bills.â He made his statement on Nov. 6 during his weekly briefing with reporters (
at about the 12 minute mark of the C-SPAN video).
Boehner, Nov. 6: [L]etâs take the 46 jobs bills that are sitting in the United States Senate that have been held up by the Democrat majority in the Senate. Almost all of those passed the House on a bipartisan basis. And I believe that almost all of them enjoy bipartisan support in the United States Senate.
Boehner has a very broad definition of âbipartisan.â Heâs correct that almost all â 44 of the 46 â received at least 1 Democratic vote. But does that make a bill bipartisan?
Merriam-Webster defines âbipartisanâ as cooperation and compromise between the two parties. It says bipartisan is âof, relating to, or involving members of two parties <a bipartisan commission>; specifically: marked by or involving cooperation, agreement, and compromise between two major political parties.â
Some high-profile examples of bipartisan legislation negotiated between the two parties during this period of gridlock would include:
- The Budget Control Act of 2011, which passed in the House on Aug. 1, 2011 with 269 votes in favor â 174 from Republicans and 95 from Democrats. That law raised the debt ceiling by at least $2.1 trillion, capped discretionary spending to save nearly $1 trillion in 10 years, and created a bipartisan committee to find at least $1.5 trillion in additional cuts over 10 years, as the Congressional Research Service explained in an Aug. 19, 2011 report.
- The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, the so-called the fiscal cliff deal, which passed the House 257-167 on Jan. 1, 2013 with 172 Democratic votes and 85 Republican votes. That bill extended the Bush-era tax cuts for most Americans, but raised taxes on the wealthiest Americans.
- The Continuing Appropriations Act of 2014, which ended the partial government shutdown. That bill passed 285 to 144 on Oct. 16, 2013 with the support of 87 Republicans and 198 Democrats.
By contrast,
Boehnerâs list of 46 bills includes 23 â exactly half â that received votes from less than 20 of the
201 House Democrats:
Boehner can call these bills bipartisan, but they are not. In fact, the White House Office of Management and Budget issued veto threats in
2013 and
2014 for 28 of the 45 bills on Boehnerâs list that would have required Obamaâs signature (the budget resolution does not). The OMB also issued statements opposing all or parts of four other bills and calling for negotiations on a fifth.
It takes a two-thirds majority to override a presidential veto and all 33 of the bills that OMB objected to didnât pass with veto-proof majorities in the House, so they likely would have gone nowhere even if the Republicans controlled the Senate â unless Republicans and the White House reached a compromise on true bipartisan bills.
We sent the list of 46 bills to
Norm Ornstein, a congressional expert at the American Enterprise Institute, for his review. He told us that the âbipartisan gameâ is played by both parties.
âBoth parties have played the âbipartisanâ game by picking off one or two strays from the other side and claiming the high ground, but it is a big stretch,â he said. âThese are not bipartisan by any reasonable definition of the term. It may be an even bigger stretch to call most of those bills âjobsâ bills.â
Matthew J. Slaughter, a former member of George W. Bushâs Council of Economic Advisers,
told the New York Times that some of the GOP bills on Boehnerâs list may help, but they wonât create many jobs.
New York Times, Oct. 22: âSome of those things will help,â Matthew J. Slaughter, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, said after reviewing nearly four dozen measures that House Republicans have labeled âjobs bills.â He cited some business tax cuts, for example, even as he cautioned about the cost of such actions.
âBut,â added Mr. Slaughter, who served on President George W. Bushâs Council of Economic Advisers, âit just struck me as sort of a compendium of modest expectations. If you ask me, âWhatâs your ballpark guess for how many jobs are going to be created?,â itâs just not many.â
Harry Reidâs Cluttered Desk
Weâd like to make a few points about the other bills on Harry Reidâs desk.
Despite Republican complaints that Reid is the cause of gridlock,
the Washington Post in August did an analysis of the past 20 congressional terms and found that the number of House-approved bills awaiting action in the Senate this session isnât that unusual.
âIn 11 of the past 19 Congresses â more than half â more than 300 bills were waiting for Senate action by the time the Congress completed its work,â Philip Bump wrote.
In fact, a
s Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler noted, the biggest backlog occurred in the 110th Congress in 2007-2008, when the Senate failed to act on more than 700 bills. And that was when the Democrats controlled both chambers.
GovTrack â a nonpartisan website that tracks legislation â also did an analysis and found that the percentage of Senate bills being ignored by the House isnât that much better. It found that the Senate has passed 124 House bills, or 26 percent of all House bills, while the House has passed 40 Senate bills, or 37 percent.
âI know 37 is bigger than 26, but in the big picture these numbers are actually pretty close. I wouldnât read much into the difference,â writes Josh Tauberer,
founder of GovTrack.
One last thing: the number of bills sitting on Harry Reidâs desk that will have an impact on the direction of the country is not as large as the Republicans declare.
As we mentioned, Republicans give different figures for the number of bills â
collecting dustâ but the one we have seen most frequently is 387.
Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, used the 387 figure on
CBSâ âFace the Nationâ on Oct. 19, when asked about the problem of congressional gridlock.
Blackburn, Oct. 19: Yes, you know, I think that what you have in the House is bipartisan frustration with Harry Reid in the Senate. You know, we have 387 House-passed bills, 98 percent of them bipartisan, 298 of those bills veto-proof. And theyâre sitting on Harry Reidâs desk.
And we find it very frustrating that the Senate has not been able to get the work done. We wish they would come back and that they would do that. It would help the country and it would get some things passed that need to be passed.
In a
Nov. 3 op-ed, Republican Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina wrote: âMy colleagues and I have advanced countless solutions to grow our economy and create jobs, but 387 House-passed bills remain collecting dust on Sen. Harry Reidâs desk.â
Blackburnâs office referred us to
a list of 387 bills on House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthyâs website. There are indeed 387 bills and resolutions on the list, but it is safe to say that that number is inflated.
The list contains dozens of ceremonial or parochial bills â including 31 bills to name or rename post offices or federal buildings, at least nine bills to authorize a study, such as whether
Mill Springs Battlefield in Kentucky should be included in the National Park System, and at least 13 that deal with federal land (transferring or exchanging, or expanding boundaries, for example). There are also
two bills to strike commemorative coins, and
a third to award a gold medal to golfer Jack Nicklaus.
We also found 21 bills that actually became law through other vehicles, including 10 appropriations bills that became part of the
Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014.
The list also contains five concurrent resolutions, which are nonbinding and do not go to the president, and two bills (
HR 4250 and
HR 5161) that had Senate-approved versions waiting for action in the House.
We spent way too much time poring through the list, but the examples above add up to 84 bills and resolutions that either shouldnât be on the list or would have little or no impact on the course of the nation.
We do not doubt that some of the 387 bills on McCarthyâs list are substantive and that some of the 46 bills on Boehnerâs list may help the economy. But any suggestion that there are 387 bills being ignored that could âgrow our economyâ or even would âhelp the countryâ is an exaggeration, and so is the speakerâs statement that âalmost allâ of the 46 âjobs billsâ are bipartisan.
