In an attempt to prevent future Congresses from overturning provisions of the new health care law, the current bill has some, umm, “interesting” language in Section. 1899A(d) (page 1019 of the 2000 page bill):

(3) LIMITATION ON CHANGES TO THE BOARD RECOMMENDATIONS.—

(A) IN GENERAL.—It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, or amendment, pursuant to this subsection or conference report thereon, that fails to satisfy the requirements of subparagraphs (A)(i) and (C) of subsection (c)(2).
(B) LIMITATION ON CHANGES TO THE BOARD RECOMMENDATIONS IN OTHER LEGISLATION.—It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report (other than pursuant to this section) that would repeal or otherwise change the recommendations of the Board if that change would fail to satisfy the requirements of subparagraphs (A)(i) and (C) of subsection (c)(2).
(C) LIMITATION ON CHANGES TO THIS SUBSECTION.—It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.
(D) WAIVER.—This paragraph may be waived or suspended in the Senate only by the affirmative vote of three-fifths of the Members, duly chosen and sworn.
(E) APPEALS.—An affirmative vote of three-fifths of the Members of the Senate, duly chosen and sworn, shall be required in the Senate to sustain an appeal of the ruling of the Chair on a point of order raised under this paragraph.

Note the requirement for a 3/5 super-majority for Congress to approve changes. There are interesting questions about whether or not the actions of one Congress are binding on future Congresses (a future Congress could just pass a new law revising this provision, one would think).

But that’s not the truly interesting part. This is:

while cloture to end debate on legislation ordinarily takes “three-fifths of all the Senators duly chosen and sworn” (60 senators when all seats are occupied), cloture on any proposed change to the Senate’s standing rules takes “two-thirds of the Senators present and voting,” or 67 senators if all 100 are on the floor.  (Both of these requirements are in Senate Rule XXII.)  Ironically, the two-thirds rule can be easier to satisfy when the active quorum of senators is smaller; it could take as few as 34 senators when a bare-minimum 51 senators are present.  But any time more than 90 senators are present, it will take more than 60 votes to end debate on any statute that works a change in the Senate’s standing rules.  Thus a good argument can be made that the mere 60 votes obtained in the recent cloture vote were insufficient to end debate on the Reid bill—because it contains at least one change to the Senate’s standing rules.

The problem is, though - the Democrats control the parliamentary procedures, and such there is nothing anyone can really do about it. The Constitution is quite clear that each chamber of the legislature is responsible for its own rules, and there’s no way whatsoever any court is stepping into this.

Interesting times we live in, huh?

H/T: The Volokh Conspiracy

How many people remember this little bit from Candidate Obama:

To achieve health care reform, “I’m going to have all the negotiations around a big table. We’ll have doctors and nurses and hospital administrators. Insurance companies, drug companies—they’ll get a seat at the table, they just won’t be able to buy every chair. But what we will do is, we’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies. And so, that approach, I think is what is going to allow people to stay involved in this process.”

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