Obama Signs CISA Bill into Law

Re:Obama Signs CISA Bill into Law by tptacek on Saturday December 19, 2015 @11:29AM (#10763971)

Bills get passed in omnibus spending bills all the time. For instance, as someone pointed out on the last thread about CISA: your COBRA health insurance? COBRA stands for "Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act".

There was extended public debate and a prolonged amendment process for CISA and PCNA in both houses of Congress. There was intense media coverage and, once CISA passed in October, the consensus was that CISA was going to be the law of the land.

The one uncertainty about it was the extent to which the House would drag CISA towards PCNA's broader law enforcement language. Thankfully, that drama, with its attendant opportunity for "public commentary", didn't happen.

For you to make a strong case for how important a prolonged conference committee would have been to the process, I think you should start by pointing out another bill that died in a conference committee due to public outcry. Has that ever happened?

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Re:Obama Signs CISA Bill into Law by AnthonyMouse on Saturday December 19, 2015 @03:07PM (#10764657)

Now you're just making the case that the Schoolhouse Rock process is never followed for controversial bills. That isn't the process being followed, it's evidence that the proponents required procedural gymnastics to subvert that process in order to get the bill passed.

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Re:Obama Signs CISA Bill into Law by DanielBMarkham on Saturday December 19, 2015 @04:45PM (#10765000)

Yes. The "Nothing to see here, folks!"/tu quoque argument is de rigeur in this type of discussion. Combine that with a little moving of the goalposts? Guaranteed hours of fun for the whole family.

For those who are interested, this type of application is fairly recent. The Reconciliation Act was passed in 74. It hadn't even been out a year before it was being used in ways not anticipated by the sponsors, and the stretching has continued year-after-year. Relevant wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_(United_States_...

IIRC, CORBA was the first big "win", providing continuing insurance privileges to folks when they left their job. A great idea, no doubt, but not a damned thing to do with the budget.

Also more information: https://www.votetocracy.com/blog/what-is-reconciliation

Interesting historical quote from the second article. President Clinton attempted to use reconciliation to pass his 1993 health care plan, but Senator Byrd, according to Wikipedia, “insisted that the health care plan was out of bounds for a process that is theoretically about budgets,”

Times have changed. Each year these things get easier and easier.

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Re:Obama Signs CISA Bill into Law by DanielBMarkham on Sunday December 20, 2015 @06:42PM (#10768804)

It's all normal! Schoolhouse Rocks guys!

I am sad.

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Re:Obama Signs CISA Bill into Law by tptacek on Saturday December 19, 2015 @07:16PM (#10765470)

CISA was probably the least controversial part of this bill. The real controversy was the budget itself; the bill involves Ryan surrendering the ability to freeze the government with future budget bills until almost after the next election. The GOP has been using that ability on and off for the last 6 years.

In message board land, the fact that the bill was finalized in the middle of the night is evidence that The Man is trying to sneak CISA past us. In reality, nobody in Congress cares about CISA; that's a done deal. It's the budget they're being sneaky about.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that CISA (and a bunch of other random stuff in the budget bill) had been scheduled to go through on the budget bill for weeks.

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