How Conference Committees Died

There's a bit of a dust-up between Byron York and Ezra Klein about conference committees...Klein is a little bit wrong, but York is far more wrong, so I figure I should do a post on it.

First, York:

Now, if you did in fact ask a kid who just took a civics class, she -- could be he! -- might explain that the House and Senate pass bills, and if there are differences between them, the bills usually go to a House/Senate conference committee, where lawmakers appointed by the leaders of both parties resolve the differences between the bills and come up with one final bill, which the House and Senate pass and which then goes to the president's desk for signature into law...Isn't that what a kid who just took a civics class would say? Isn't that what we teach in textbooks? And is that what's being practiced in the case of the national health care bills?
The answer, of course, is no, because Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid, who in the past have been strong advocates of conference committees, decided to skip conference for the health care bill. Why? Because it might be troublesome -- and public. Better to bypass it altogether, assured that Klein and others will devote their energies to attacking Republican irresponsibility.

Klein responds:

Mitch McConnell (under pressure from Jim DeMint and other conservative hardliners) was threatening to object to the appointment of conferees...So Democrats decided to go another way.

Well, yes and no.  It's true that Republicans shut off the possibility of a conference committee by threatening to object to the appointment of conferees, but it's pretty likely that Democrats would have planned to avoid the conference committee anyway -- and certainly would have done so after the Massachusetts Senate election made pass-and-patch the only realistic way to pass the bill.   That's because, contrary to what York believes, conference committees of the type seen in the 1970s and 1980s are no longer standard operating procedure in Congress. 

I'll go through it:

First, during the years that Republicans controlled Congress (and especially 2003-2006), they began using conference committees only to formally ratify decisions that were reached in private, with Democrats excluded from negotiations.

Then, when Democrats took back control of Congress in 2007, they changed the rules (modifying them again in 2009), adding a new point of order that could be used against provisions added in conference that were not in either the House or Senate bill.  The intentions may have been to prevent DeLay-style wholesale rewriting of the bill in conference, but the result was that the Dems switched from using conference committees to "ping-pong" procedures. 

(There's an excellent column by Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein on this, which unfortunately I can't find anywhere; see also their book, The Broken Branch).

The bottom line is that conference committees as actual working bodies died under the Republican Congresses before 2007, while formal conference committees were killed off by the Democrats after 2007.  Not completely -- some bills still go that route -- but for the most part, conference committees were long gone well before the Republicans threatened to prevent the Democrats from organizing one this time around.  Which, odds are, they would not have done, anyway.