Conference Committees

Atrios makes a good point today, almost as an aside, when he says:

I caution any Dems about getting suckered into a "bipartisan plan" to "reform" [Social Security] which will be magically switcherooed by DeLay's goons on the conference committee.

Congressional Republicans have made it quite clear that while they sometimes want bipartisan votes, they never want bipartisan bills. No matter how tempting a bill might look on the floor to a Democrat trying to move the progressive ball down the field, one can be assured that such a bill will never make it out of the conference committee and onto the President's desk. John Podesta, CEO of the Center for American Progress, outlines the procedure:

The conservative leadership in Congress now also routinely excludes members of the minority, and even moderates in their own party, from conference committees. For example the conference committee on the energy bill, to which 58 members of Congress were formally appointed, actually consisted of private negotiations between just four members: Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Congressman Billy Tauzin (R-La.), and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Representative Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) on the tax portions of the bill. When the Senate passed a version of the energy legislation that was not to the liking of Senator Domenici, he bluntly declared, “I will rewrite the bill.” While a couple of members of the minority party were permitted to participate in committee negotiations over the Medicare legislation, those who did not see eye to eye with conservative leaders – including Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) – were excluded. The product of these secret conference negotiations – typically hundreds, if not thousands of pages long – is then sent to each chamber, often with 24-hours or less to review, for a straight up-or-down vote without prospect of amendments. Instead of providing meaningful time for amendments and debate on either bill, conservatives spent 40-hours demogaguing the issue of judicial confirmations – even though President Bush has had 98 percent of his nominees approved. The result has been not just the effective exclusion of the minority party (and the millions of citizens they represent) from any role in the legislation but also a series of poorly crafted, incoherent bills that are packed with provisions geared toward special interests at the expense of the public good.

Democrats really need to understand that they're not going to get anything legislatively out of the Republicans in this Congress. When it comes to the big, defining issues, we have to hang tough, and not be tempted by the illusions of bipartisanship that the GOP will put in front of us.