Issue date: 1/24/10 Section: News and Opinion

For a bill to become a law, it must first go through a long, arduous process of hearings, debates, and votes. The health care reform bill is no exception, and the final stage of its completion is getting closer and closer. But it's not here quite yet.

Article 1, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution says that the Senate and House of Representatives must pass the same version of a bill before it can become law. In order for that to happen, senior members of both houses must come together in conference committee to resolve any differences between the House and Senate versions of a given bill.

For the most part, rules are pretty lax when it comes to conference committees. Congressional leadership (that would be Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi) appoint delegates to the committee, and numbers of attendees don't have to be equal on the House and Senate side. In other words, there could be three members of the House present and 10 members of the Senate present, and that would be fine. However, House rules stipulate that conference meetings must be public and open for all to see.

But apparently, House rules don't hold much weight when it comes to passing a massive reform bill that would overhaul the nation's health care system. The House and Senate versions of the bill contain many stark differences that need to be resolved; something that will need to be done with approval from Sens. Lieberman and Nelson, the last two to sign on to the Senate version. Essentially, the health care debate is far from over, and final completion with President Obama's signature is still a long way off.

Yet instead of hashing out the final version in conference committee, Senator Reid and Representative Pelosi have decided to hold closed meetings with only a handful of congressional members, all of them Democrat, no less.

The most obvious and chief suspected reason for circumventing the normal process is that the Democrats want to continue to ram through health care reform with as little debate as possible and without any Republican input. That may be true, but there's also another reason Democrats chose to do without a conference committee. Ironically, that reason is the 2007 passage of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act.

The Act was passed as a measure of ethical reforms, and among other things, amended Senate Rule 28 to make it harder for members of the conference committee to take out measures in the final bill that were identical in both chambers, and add provisions that were in neither the House nor Senate versions. This made it easier for senators not present in the conference committee, to be able to strike out any provisions that were added or taken away, without defeating the entire conference report.

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