RNC Official On Murkowski Amendment: Great Use Of An "Obscure Procedure"

Last Thursday afternoon, RNC Deputy Chief of Staff for Government Affairs Scott Kamins hosted a national call to discuss Sen. Lisa Murkowski's (R-AK) amendment that "would dismantle the Clean Air Act as a tool for combating global warming" and "would overturn the Environmental Protection Agency's scientific finding that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that endangers the public's health and welfare."

Unlike most other legislative measures, this amendment only needs 51 votes to pass -- thus avoiding the whole filibuster question.  Murkowski doesn't have to go through the process of achieving 60 votes because she has set up her amendment as a "resolution of disapproval" and "once a disapproval resolution is placed on the Senate calendar, it is then subject to expedited consideration on the Senate floor, and not subject to filibuster."

Just before the Q & A portion of the call, Kamins praised Senator Murkowski's use of a "reasonably obscure procedure" to push through her amendment and said that Republicans should do things like this more often to get other agenda items passed.

Kamins: ...The uniqueness of this from a legislative procedure standpoint, is that you don't need 60 votes for passage, it can't be filibustered, and it can't -- the other bag of tricks that Harry Reid has used to preclude other bills from coming to the floor are not available to him because of the unique privilege that attaches to this form of resolution.  So Sen. Murkowski and her team deserve a good bit of credit for having, having found this reasonably obscure procedure and used it to highlight a very, very important issue and really to find a pathway to address this...and maybe something we should be doing on a more routine basis on other issues.

Does the phrase "obscure procedure" sound familiar? It should...because it's similar to how the Republicans talked about budget reconciliation during their ill-fated attempt to fight health care reform. 

Budget reconciliation was not obscure or unknown or something new invented by an evil cadre of dirty hippies.  But that didn't stop RNC Chairman Michael Steele from calling it "a parliamentary trick" or Sen. Scott Brown from saying Democrats "found a way to circumvent the will of the people" -- they were determined to paint a pretty standard parliamentary procedure as something nefarious.

Now, however, the RNC is hoping to find more "obscure procedures" to bend national law to their will and cause immeasurable harm to future generations of Americans.

How convenient.