Leaked Cabinet Office papers apparently seen by the BBC show Tory chief whip told then-Tory leader about deal to grant Ashcroft's peerage in July 2000

William Hague, the former Conservative leader, was kept in the loop at the time about negotiations of Lord Ashcroft's tax status, according to reports today.

Leaked Cabinet Office papers apparently seen by the BBC show the senior Tory MP involved in protracted negotiations to secure a deal told officials that Hague, at that time the party leader, was "satisfied that the action adequately met the terms of Mr Ashcroft's undertakings", in July 2000.

The assurance was given by the then-Tory chief whip, James Arbuthnot, who the papers show was involved in negotiations lasting around four months to agree the terms for the Tory donor's peerage, after a deal was finalised.

Hague has said that while he knew an arrangement would be agreed with the Cabinet Office, "I would not, of course, know the details of that."

The leaked report is likely to stoke Labour and Liberal Democrat demands for greater clarity about when senior Tories first became aware Ashcroft was a "non-dom".

Earlier this month, Hague said he had only known the details around the arrangement "for a few months" that the peer had renegotiated the terms under which he took his place in the House of Lords.

David Cameron, the current Tory leader, said he was not told until even later about arrangements involving the major Conservative donor.

Reports that Hague was kept informed at the time of the deal surfaced as two parliamentary committees prepared to hold inquiries into the circumstances surrounding the award of Ashcroft's peerage.

But the committees will not hear from Ashcroft, the Tory deputy chairman, himself, after he failed to respond to an invitation to give evidence in what one Labour member yesterday described as a "terrible discourtesy".

The Commons public administration committee will hold a one-off hearing into the issue of propriety and peerages, sparked by Ashcroft's announcement earlier this month that he is "non-domiciled" status for tax purposes.

And peers on the subcommittee on Lords' interests will consider a Labour MP's complaint that Ashcroft breached the code of conduct of the upper house by failing to fulfil a pledge to become a permanent UK resident as a condition of his ennoblement.

The hearings come amid reports that a Panorama investigation into Ashcroft had been shelved by the BBC following threats of legal action, and may not be screened until after the general election.

The revelation of Ashcroft's non-dom status has been highly embarrassing to the Conservatives, as the billionaire businessman gave former leader Hague a written assurance in 2000 that he would take up permanent residence in the UK.

His pledge came after he was twice turned down for a peerage, in part because of concerns that his residence in the central American state of Belize made him a tax exile.

The public administration committee will hear evidence today from Lady Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde, a member of the Lords vetting panel that finally approved his nomination after receiving his promise to live in the UK.

And it will hear from former Whitehall mandarin Sir Hayden Phillips, who oversaw an agreement that later amended Ashcroft's assurance so he would become a "long-term" rather than "permanent" UK resident, clearing the way for him to claim non-dom status.

The change allowed Ashcroft to pay UK tax only on his British income, not on the bulk of his earnings, which come from overseas. Liberal Democrats have estimated the arrangement has saved him more than £120m over the past decade.

Ashcroft has given more than £4m to the Tories since Cameron became leader in 2005, directing the funds at the key marginal seats the party needs to win to gain power.

The three Conservative MPs on the public administration committee have said they will not take part in today's session, fearing it will be used for "political purposes".

Labour member Gordon Prentice yesterday said invitations to Ashcroft and Hague to give evidence had been ignored, in what he described as "a terrible discourtesy" to the committee.

The subcommittee on Lords' interests, chaired by former MI5 director general Lady Manningham-Buller, will consider a complaint from Labour MP Martin Linton that Ashcroft's failure to pay full UK tax amounted to a breach of the Lords code of conduct.

Linton said: "When he became a peer, the code of conduct said peers should 'act with honour'. Shortly afterwards, it was changed to include specific requirements for openness and accountability.

"On either count, I think there has been a breach."

The Independent today reported that a Panorama investigation involving interviews with politicians and businessmen in Belize and the Turks and Caicos Islands, where Lord Ashcroft has business interests, had been put on hold.

The paper quoted an unnamed insider as saying the programme may not go out until after the election, not because of fears of influencing the poll but because of legal concerns.

A BBC spokesman told the Independent: "The programme is not on the schedule at the moment. We do not know when it will be aired."

• Michael Ashcroft
• Conservatives
• William Hague
• Party funding
• House of Lords

I believe that the ultimate goal of environmentalists is to have all of our buildings be completely independent from “the grid”. In other words, through the use of sustainable resources, buildings will have all the power they need without the power company.

This building, known as the Strata Building, is one step in the right direction. The Strata, also known as the Razor, has three giant turbines on its 42nd story top. These blades are in the building facade and can generate eight percent of the building’s energy use.

In other words, it is a building with windmills on top. A lot of homes have chosen to have windmills in order to generate power, but they usually only end up being energy efficient if you get all the wind you need. In the case of the Strata, they are capable of generating 50MWh of electricity each year, which is not bad, even if it is less than ten percent.

My source was quick to point out that the Strata must not be put in the way of other buildings. I mean, how would you like to design a building with wind turbines and then put it in the middle of a city so the wind can’t get to it? Why is it that I can totally see a city planning committee making just such a mistake?

Source

Filed under: Car Buying, Government/Legal, Ford, GM, Mercury

Report: Congressmen spending thousands of dollars a month to lease ordinary vehicles originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

On March 16, Fox News anchors during their self-described daytime "news hours" repeatedly forwarded the false suggestion that, by using a legislative procedure known as the "self-executing rule" to finalize health care reform in the House, Democrats would be passing health care reform "without actually voting for it." In fact, implementing the proposed procedure requires a majority vote.

The New York Times reported on October 11, 2009, that Fox News claims its news hours are objective and defined as "9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. on weekdays." Those weekday hours include America's Newsroom, Happening Now,and America Live, which replaced Live Desk in early 2010.

Hemmer: The self-executing rule "does not require a single vote." On Fox News' America's Newsroom, co-host Bill Hemmer blog post, The Washington Post's Ezra Klein explained that the legislative process Democrats are considering using, theself-executing vote "functions as a vote on the Senate bill" because "the House will pass the fixes under a rule that says the House 'deems' the Senate bill passed after the House passes the fixes." Klein wrote:

Here's how that will work: Rather than passing the Senate bill and then passing the fixes, the House will pass the fixes under a rule that says the House "deems" the Senate bill passed after the House passes the fixes.

The virtue of this, for Pelosi's members, is that they don't actually vote on the Senate bill. They only vote on the reconciliation package. But their vote on the reconciliation package functions as a vote on the Senate bill. The difference is semantic, but the bottom line is this: When the House votes on the reconciliation fixes, the Senate bill is passed, even if the Senate hasn't voted on the reconciliation fixes, and even though the House never specifically voted on the Senate bill.

It's a circuitous strategy born of necessity. Pelosi doesn't have votes for the Senate bill without the reconciliation package. But the Senate parliamentarian said that the Senate bill must be signed into law before the reconciliation package can be signed into law. That removed Pelosi's favored option of passing the reconciliation fixes before passing the Senate bill. So now the House will vote on reconciliation explicitly and the Senate bill implicitly, which is politically easier, even though the effect is not any different than if Congress were to pass the Senate bill first and pass the reconciliation fixes after.

CRS: Self-executing rule requires House's approval. A 2006 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report makes clear that passage of a rule by the House is required for the "self-executing" rule to be adopted. From CRS:

Definition of "Self-Executing" Rule. One of the newer types is called a "self-executing" rule; it embodies a "two-for-one" procedure. This means that when the House adopts a rule it also simultaneously agrees to dispose of a separate matter, which is specified in the rule itself. For instance, self-executing rules may stipulate that a discrete policy proposal is deemed to have passed the House and been incorporated in the bill to be taken up. The effect: neither in the House nor in the Committee of the Whole will lawmakers have an opportunity to amend or to vote separately on the "self-executed" provision. It was automatically agreed to when the House passed the rule. Rules of this sort contain customary, or "boilerplate," language, such as: "The amendment printed in [section 2 of this resolution or in part 1 of the report of the Committee on Rules accompanying this resolution] shall be considered as adopted in the House and in the Committee of the Whole."

Don Wolfensberger, former chief of staff for the House Rules Committee under Republicans, stated in a 2006 Roll Call column:

Almost every major bill must obtain a special rule, or resolution, from the Rules Committee permitting immediate floor consideration. The resolution also specifies the amount of general debate time and what amendments will be allowed. A special rule also may contain other bells, whistles, gizmos and gadgets.One of these optional attachments is a self-executing provision, which decrees a specified amendment to have been adopted upon the rule's passage [emphasis added]. In other words, once the House adopts the special rule it effectively has adopted the amendment before the bill has even been called up for consideration [emphasis added].

Fox News repeatedly falsely labels reconciliation as "nuclear option." Fox News hosts and guests have repeatedly pushed the falsehood that the "nuclear option" refers to the budget reconciliation process. The Fox Nation and Fox News personalities like Hannity, Van Susteren, Dick Morris, Bret Baier, and Bill Sammon have all falsely compared reconciliation to the "nuclear option," and the Fox Nation has previously coupled its headlines with images of a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb:

Laura Rozen / Laura Rozen's Blog:
Admin, Dems move to put dispute with Israel in perspective  —  As a key pro-Israel House Democrat Howard Berman (D-Cal.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, voiced sympathy for the Obama administration's sense of frustration with an Israeli government settlements announcement last week …

The headline of an Associated Press "fact check" article falsely suggested that President Obama's health care plan would cause people to pay higher health insurance premiums. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that by 2016 the Senate's version of health care reform -- on which Obama's plan is largely modeled -- would not increase premiums for the vast majority of Americans, and for many, premium costs would decrease.

AP: "Premiums would rise under Obama plan." The headline of a March 17 AP "fact check" article stated, "Premiums would rise under Obama plan," falsely suggesting that people would pay higher health insurance premiums under health care reform. The article cited a CBO report on the Senate's health care bill to discuss how premiums would be affected by health care reform legislation.

CBO: Premiums in group market will not increase. CBO estimated that the large group and small group markets make up 83 percent of the insurance market and that those premiums would essentially remain unchanged and could decrease.

PolitiFact: "CBO reported that, for most people, premiums would stay about the same, or slightly decrease." A January 27 PolitiFact.com analysis labeled the claim that health care reform would cause premiums for most Americans to increase "pants on fire" false and stated, "The CBO reported that, for most people, premiums would stay about the same, or slightly decrease." From PolitiFact.com:

On Nov. 30, 2009, the Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, released a detailed analysis on how health insurance premiums might be affected by the Senate Democrats' health care bill. The CBO is an independent agency whose estimates for pending legislation are considered nonpartisan and rigorous.

The CBO reported that, for most people, premiums would stay about the same, or slightly decrease. This was especially true for people who get their insurance through work. (Health policy wonks call these the large group and small group markets.) People who have to go out and buy insurance on their own (the individual market) would see rates increase by 10 to 13 percent. But more than half of those people -- 57 percent, in fact -- would be eligible for subsidies to help them pay for the insurance. People who get subsidies would see their premiums drop by more than half, according to the CBO. So most people would see their premiums stay the same or potentially drop.

CBO: Most individual enrollees would receive subsidies, which would decrease the premiums they pay by "56 percent to 59 percent" on average. CBO estimated that by 2016 a majority of people insured on the individual market would receive subsidies, which would decrease their premiums compared to what they would pay without health care reform. CBO stated, "The majority of nongroup enrollees (about 57 percent) would receive subsidies via the new insurance exchanges, and those subsidies, on average, would cover nearly two-thirds of the total premium, CBO and JCT [Joint Committee on Taxation] estimate. Thus, the amount that subsidized enrollees would pay for nongroup coverage would be roughly 56 percent to 59 percent lower, on average, than the nongroup premiums charged under current law." Claims that the bill would increase premiums in the individual market are based on estimates that do not factor in subsidies.

Washington Post's Ezra Klein: "CBO found health-care reform would reduce premiums." The Washington Post's Ezra Klein reported on an exchange between Obama and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) during the February 25 health care summit:

Lamar Alexander and Barack Obama just had a contentious exchange on this point, so it's worth settling the issue: Yes, the CBO found health-care reform would reduce premiums. The issue gets confused because it also found that access to subsidies would encourage people to buy more comprehensive insurance, which would mean that the value of their insurance would be higher after reform than before it. But that's not the same as insurance becoming more expensive: The fact that I could buy a nicer car after getting a better job suggests that cars are becoming pricier. The bottom line is that if you're comparing two plans that are exactly the same, costs go down after reform.

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson asserted that the Democrats are working "to achieve the congressional equivalent of the Immaculate Conception - a law without a vote" and that the self-executing rule would allow health care reform "to slip by the House." In fact, the self-executing rule requires a majority vote in order to pass and, as the Post's Ezra Klein has noted, "the effect" of passing it "is not any different than if Congress were to pass" the Senate's health care "bill first and pass the reconciliation fixes after."

From Michael Gerson's March 17 Washington Post column:

As of this writing, a president who seems willing to interrupt prime-time programming on the slightest pretext has not scheduled a speech from the Oval Office to make his final health-reform appeal. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is working her parliamentarians overtime to achieve the congressional equivalent of the Immaculate Conception -- a law without a vote. One gets the impression that Democrats would prefer health reform to slip by the House in a procedural maneuver on a Friday night during the NCAA basketball tournament -- which it might.

The most visible Democratic domestic priority of the past 40 years must be smuggled into law, lest too many Americans notice. Politicians claiming the idealism of saints have adopted the tactics of burglars. Victory, if it comes, will seem less like a parade than a heist.

Ezra Klein: "[V]ote on the reconciliation package functions as a vote on the Senate bill." In a March 15 blog post, The Washington Post's Ezra Klein explained that the self-executing vote "functions as a vote on the Senate bill" because "the House will pass the fixes under a rule that says the House 'deems' the Senate bill passed after the House passes the fixes." Klein wrote:

Here's how that will work: Rather than passing the Senate bill and then passing the fixes, the House will pass the fixes under a rule that says the House "deems" the Senate bill passed after the House passes the fixes.

The virtue of this, for Pelosi's members, is that they don't actually vote on the Senate bill. They only vote on the reconciliation package. But their vote on the reconciliation package functions as a vote on the Senate bill. The difference is semantic, but the bottom line is this: When the House votes on the reconciliation fixes, the Senate bill is passed, even if the Senate hasn't voted on the reconciliation fixes, and even though the House never specifically voted on the Senate bill.

It's a circuitous strategy born of necessity. Pelosi doesn't have votes for the Senate bill without the reconciliation package. But the Senate parliamentarian said that the Senate bill must be signed into law before the reconciliation package can be signed into law. That removed Pelosi's favored option of passing the reconciliation fixes before passing the Senate bill. So now the House will vote on reconciliation explicitly and the Senate bill implicitly, which is politically easier, even though the effect is not any different than if Congress were to pass the Senate bill first and pass the reconciliation fixes after.

CRS: Self-executing rule requires House's approval. A 2006 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report makes clear that passage of a rule by the House is required for the "self-executing" rule to be adopted. From CRS:

Definition of "Self-Executing" Rule. One of the newer types is called a "self-executing" rule; it embodies a "two-for-one" procedure. This means that when the House adopts a rule it also simultaneously agrees to dispose of a separate matter, which is specified in the rule itself. For instance, self-executing rules may stipulate that a discrete policy proposal is deemed to have passed the House and been incorporated in the bill to be taken up. The effect: neither in the House nor in the Committee of the Whole will lawmakers have an opportunity to amend or to vote separately on the "self-executed" provision. It was automatically agreed to when the House passed the rule. Rules of this sort contain customary, or "boilerplate," language, such as: "The amendment printed in [section 2 of this resolution or in part 1 of the report of the Committee on Rules accompanying this resolution] shall be considered as adopted in the House and in the Committee of the Whole."

Don Wolfensberger, former chief of staff for the House Rules Committee under Republicans, stated in a 2006 Roll Call column: "Almost every major bill must obtain a special rule, or resolution, from the Rules Committee permitting immediate floor consideration. The resolution also specifies the amount of general debate time and what amendments will be allowed. A special rule also may contain other bells, whistles, gizmos and gadgets. One of these optional attachments is a self-executing provision, which decrees a specified amendment to have been adopted upon the rule's passage. In other words, once the House adopts the special rule it effectively has adopted the amendment before the bill has even been called up for consideration [emphasis added]."

CongressDaily: House would still have to vote on corrections to the Senate bill. NationalJournal.com's CongressDaily reported (subscription required) that the rule would require that the "House approves a corrections bill that would make changes to the Senate version" for passage. From CongressDaily:

House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter is prepping to help usher the healthcare overhaul through the House and potentially avoid a direct vote on the Senate overhaul bill, the chairwoman said Tuesday.

Slaughter is weighing preparing a rule that would consider the Senate bill passed once the House approves a corrections bill that would make changes to the Senate version.

A March 17 Washington Times article falsely described reconciliation and the self-executing rule as "rare procedural tools" that Democrats may invoke to pass health care reform. In fact, both procedures have been used repeatedly and are an accepted part of House procedure.

From the March 17 Washington Times article, titled, "'Self-executing rule' decried as a 'trick'":

House Democrats Tuesday defended the idea of tying together the Senate health care overhaul bill and a companion bill of repairs that could spare members from having to vote outright for the Senate's tax on high-cost insurance plans and other contentious provisions.

[...]

Although specific plans to tie the bills together - using a procedure known as the "self-executing rule" - haven't been announced, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said during a discussion with bloggers Monday that she liked the idea "because people don't have to vote on the Senate bill."

Republicans called the potential use of the procedure another trick to circumvent the public and protect House Democrats at the ballot box in November.

[...]

But the election of Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown gave Republicans enough votes to filibuster a conference report, the traditional way the two chambers repair differences between their respective bills. That led Democrats to pursue rare procedural tools to pass President Obama's top legislative agenda item, requiring the House to pass the Senate bill and both chambers to pass a bill that repairs it.

Congressional Research Service reported that Congress used reconciliation process to pass 21 bills between 1980 and 2007. An August 10, 2005, Congressional Research Service (CRS) report lists 19 bills Congress passed that were enacted through reconciliation from FY 1981 to FY 2005 -- 16 of which became law and three of which were vetoed by President Clinton. A separate March 2008 CRS report lists an additional three reconciliation bills passed by Congress since 2005.

GOP used reconciliation to pass Bush's tax cuts. Republicans used the reconciliation process to pass Bush's 2001 tax cut, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001; Bush's 2003 tax cuts, the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003; and Bush's 2005 tax cuts, the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the 2001 tax cuts would "reduce projected total surpluses by approximately $1.35 trillion over the 2001-2011 period"; that the 2003 tax cuts would "reduce projected total surpluses by approximately $1.35 trillion over the 2001-2011 period"; and that the 2005 tax cuts would "reduce federal revenues ... by $69.1 billion over the 2006-2015 period."

Republicans repeatedly voted to use reconciliation to pass components of welfare reform. Congress employed the reconciliation process to pass welfare reform in 1996 as part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Senate Republicans previously included welfare reform provisions in the Balanced Budget Act of 1995, which Clinton vetoed. As CRS reports, 46 provisions of the bill were deemed extraneous by the Senate's presiding officer. Fifty-three Republicans voted in favor of a motion to waive the point of order, but the motion -- which requires 60 votes -- failed on a 53-46 vote.

Reconciliation has repeatedly been used to reform health care. On February 24, NPR noted that many "major changes to health care laws" passed via reconciliation. Additionally, during a February 24 broadcast of NPR's Morning Edition, correspondent Julie Rovner quoted George Washington University health policy professor Sara Rosenbaum saying: "In fact, the way in which virtually all of health reform, with very, very limited exceptions, has happened over the past 30 years has been the reconciliation process."

Congress used reconciliation to pass Medicare Advantage. As part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, enacted through the reconciliation process, Congress -- which was controlled by the Republicans at the time -- created the "Medicare+Choice Program," currently known as Medicare Advantage or Medicare Part C. The program allows seniors to enroll in HMO-type plans rather than the traditional Medicare fee-for-service plan.

Congress used reconciliation to pass COBRA. As stated on the Department of Labor website, as part of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985, Congress gave "workers and their families who lose their health benefits the right to choose to continue group health benefits provided by their group health plan for limited periods of time under certain circumstances."

Congress used reconciliation to pass Patient Self-Determination Act. As part of the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1990, Congress passed the Patient Self-Determination Act, which requires hospitals, nursing homes, HMOs, and other organizations that participate in Medicare or Medicaid to provide information about advance directives and patients' decision-making rights.

Republicans repeatedly attempted to use reconciliation to pass increase in Medicare eligibility age. The version of the Balanced Budget Act of 1995 introduced by then-Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici (R-NM) using the reconciliation procedure contained a section providing for raising the Medicare eligibility age. As the CRS reported, the provision was stricken from the bill during floor consideration on the basis of a point of order that the provision was "extraneous" to matters appropriate to reconciliation.

The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 -- also introduced through the reconciliation procedure -- also included a provision to raise the eligibility age. Fifty Republicans voted in favor of waiving a point of order against the provision that it was extraneous, allowing the provision to remain in the bill. The final version of the bill signed by Clinton did not contain this provision.

Wolfensberger: Republicans "set new records" for using self-executing rule. Don Wolfensberger, former chief of staff for the House Rules Committee under Republican leadership, stated in a 2006 Roll Call column that the Republican Party "set new records" for its use of the self-executing rule in the years following Gingrich's ascension as Speaker:

Self-executing rules began innocently enough in the 1970s as a way of making technical corrections to bills. But, as the House became more partisan in the 1980s, the majority leadership was empowered by its caucus to take all necessary steps to pass the party's bills. This included a Rules Committee that was used more creatively to devise procedures to all but guarantee policy success. The self-executing rule was one such device to make substantive changes in legislation while ensuring majority passage.

When Republicans were in the minority, they railed against self-executing rules as being anti-deliberative because they undermined and perverted the work of committees and also prevented the House from having a separate debate and vote on the majority's preferred changes. From the 95th to 98th Congresses (1977-84), there were only eight self-executing rules making up just 1 percent of the 857 total rules granted. However, in Speaker Tip O'Neill's (D-Mass.) final term in the 99th Congress, there were 20 self-executing rules (12 percent). In Rep. Jim Wright's (D-Texas) only full term as Speaker, in the 100th Congress, there were 18 self-executing rules (17 percent). They reached a high point of 30 under Speaker Tom Foley (D-Wash.) during the final Democratic Congress, the 103rd, for 22 percent of all rules.

When Republicans took power in 1995, they soon lost their aversion to self-executing rules and proceeded to set new records under Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). There were 38 and 52 self-executing rules in the 104th and 105th Congresses (1995-1998), making up 25 percent and 35 percent of all rules, respectively. Under Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) there were 40, 42 and 30 self-executing rules in the 106th, 107th and 108th Congresses (22 percent, 37 percent and 22 percent, respectively). Thus far in the 109th Congress, self-executing rules make up about 16 percent of all rules.

On April 26 [2006], the Rules Committee served up the mother of all self-executing rules for the lobby/ethics reform bill. The committee hit the trifecta with not one, not two, but three self-executing provisions in the same special rule.

Conservative media figures have recently claimed that the use of a legislative procedure called a "self-executing rule" to pass health care reform in the House is unconstitutional. However, Yale law professor Jack Balkin has explained that the procedure in question would pass constitutional muster; additionally, federal appeals courts have recently held that the constitutional requirement that both houses pass a bill has been met when the House speaker and Senate president attest the bill has passed.

Beck: "How is this even constitutional?" Discussing the "Slaughter rule" on the March 16 edition of his show, Beck asked: "How is this even constitutional?" Beck similarly wrote in his newsletter that Democrats are "slaughtering the Constitution" and that "the Constitution is being thwarted" if the health care reform legislation passes using the self-executing rule.

BigGovernment: Congress is "violating the Constitution" with Slaughter rule. A March 11 post on Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment website stated that the "Slaughter Solution has one very large obstacle -- the Constitution Article I, Section 7," and that "if this Congress continues down this path of violating the Constitution, the 'people' will have a viable case, class-action or otherwise, in the US courts because it is going to be extremely difficult for a judge to ignore that the 111th Democrat-Progressive led Congress violated Article I, Section 7 to the most obscene extent."

Jim Hoft: "Democrats will use the unconstitutional 'Slaughter Rule.' " In a March 14 post on his Gateway Pundit blog, Jim Hoft wrote: "Democratic leader Rep. Chris Van Hollen admitted today on FOX News Sunday that democrats will use the unconstitutional 'Slaughter Rule' to ram their pro-abortion nationalized health care bill through Congress. Democrats announced this tactic last week. They will pass the bill without voting on it. They will take over one-sixth of the US economy without even voting on it."

Hot Air: House is using self-executing rule "for the first time in U.S. history." A March 14 Hot Air blog post stated: "We're hours away from Slaughter revealing the strategy and Democrats have no other mechanism to pass a bill other than using an extra-Constitutional procedure. They don't have the votes to pass the Senate Bill, so they are -- for the first time in U.S. history -- about to rule that they actually passed a bill they never voted on."

Malkin calls Rep. Slaughter a "Constitution-butcher." On March 13, Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin displayed the following graphic on her website under the headline, "Constitution Butchers: Stop Pelosi's Slaughter House":

Yale Law professor Balkin: Self-executing rule is constitutional if done properly. In a March 15 post on his Balkinization blog, Balkin wrote:

[T]here is a way that "deem and pass" could be done constitutionally. There have to be two separate bills signed by the President: the first one is the original Senate bill, and the second one is the reconciliation bill. The House must pass the Senate bill and it must also pass the reconciliation bill. The House may do this on a single vote if the special rule that accompanies the reconciliation bill says that by passing the reconciliation bill the House agrees to pass the same text of the same bill that the Senate has passed. That is to say, the language of the special rule that accompanies the reconciliation bill must make the House take political responsibility for passing the same language as the Senate bill. The House must say that the House has consented to accept the text of the Senate bill as its own political act. At that point the President can sign the two bills, and it does not matter that the House has passed both through a special rule. Under Article I, section 5 of the Constitution, the House can determine its own rules for passing legislation. There are plenty of precedents for passing legislation by reference through a special rule.

Federal appeals courts recently decided that constitutional requirement is satisfied when Speaker and Senate president attest that identical language passed both houses. In Public Citizen v. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that if both the House speaker and the Senate president attest that identical bills have passed both houses of Congress, the courts must accept that the constitutional requirement has been satisfied. (Malkin and other conservatives have pointed to the Public Citizen case to falsely accuse Democrats of hypocrisy.) From the decision (which quoted from the Supreme Court case, Marshall Field et al. v. Clark):

The Court crafted a clear rule: "[I]t is not competent for [a party raising a bicameralism challenge] to show, from the journals of either house, from the reports of committees or from other documents printed by authority of Congress, that [an] enrolled bill" differs from that actually passed by Congress. Id. at 680, 12 S.Ct. 495. The only "evidence upon which a court may act when the issue is made as to whether a bill ... asserted to have become a law, was or was not passed by Congress" is an enrolled act attested to by declaration of "the two houses, through their presiding officers." Id. at 670, 672, 12 S.Ct. 495. An enrolled bill, "thus attested," "is conclusive evidence that it was passed by Congress." Id. at 672-73, 12 S.Ct. 495. "[T]he enrollment itself is the record, which is conclusive as to what the statute is ..." Id. at 675, 12 S.Ct. 495. [alterations in the original]

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit agreed with the D.C. Circuit in OneSimpleLoan v. Secretary of Education.

Congressional scholar Ornstein: Conservative criticism of self-executing rule is "hypocrisy," "feigned indignation," and "disinformation." From a post by Norman Ornstein on the American Enterprise Institute's blog, The Enterprise, titled, "Hypocrisy: A Parliamentary Procedure":

Any veteran observer of Congress is used to the rampant hypocrisy over the use of parliamentary procedures that shifts totally from one side to the other as a majority moves to minority status, and vice versa. But I can't recall a level of feigned indignation nearly as great as what we are seeing now from congressional Republicans and their acolytes at the Wall Street Journal, and on blogs, talk radio, and cable news. It reached a ridiculous level of misinformation and disinformation over the use of reconciliation, and now threatens to top that level over the projected use of a self-executing rule by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the last Congress that Republicans controlled, from 2005 to 2006, Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier used the self-executing rule more than 35 times, and was no stranger to the concept of "deem and pass." That strategy, then decried by the House Democrats who are now using it, and now being called unconstitutional by WSJ editorialists, was defended by House Republicans in court (and upheld). Dreier used it for a $40 billion deficit reduction package so that his fellow GOPers could avoid an embarrassing vote on immigration.

Rob Carlson, author of Biology is Technology: The promise, perils, and new business of engineering life, was recently in the Bay Area to deliver a talk to the California Assembly Select Committee on Biotechnology. His presentation focused on the role of small businesses and garage hackers in innovating the new bioeconomy. You can see his slides here.

While he was in the area, he visited some folks doing biology hacking in their garages. On his blog, he writes:

Garage Biology in Silicon Valley

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Download Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview via Fileforum now.

[Today's delay in Betanews bringing you Internet Explorer 9 news was brought to you as a public service by the Cable Modem: Your Best Friend When It's Crunch Time. Remember, where there's smoke, there's a Comcast cable modem. Smell one today.]

It is perhaps the unlikeliest scenario any technologist could imagine as recently as two years ago: Microsoft evangelizing developers to embrace Web standards by helping it to build its Web browser. Although one of the first browsers to be distributed for free, Internet Explorer has never been open source. Historically, it's always been ready when it's ready; its value proposition has been to the consumer who prefers convenience over adaptability; and when the fact that it was dirt slow was pointed out, the response typically was, the consumer isn't going to care.

Today, the value proposition started to take shape for IE9, the browser that in an earlier era didn't need a value proposition. Microsoft's strategy, which premiered today at MIX 10, was to seize control of tomorrow's key talking point, HTML 5 compliance and compatibility -- to make HTML 5 identifiable with Internet Explorer. In fact, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch's greeting sentence to MIX 10 attendees this morning wasn't without the term "HTML 5."

"When we started looking deeply at HTML 5, we saw that it enabled a whole new class of applications," was Hachamovitch's second sentence. "These applications will stress the browser runtime and hardware, as today's sites just don't. We quickly realized that doing HTML 5 right -- our intent -- was more about designing around what HTML 5 applications will need, rather than a particular set of features. Done right, HTML 5 applications will feel more like real apps than Web pages, and our approach to HTML 5 is to make standard Web patterns that developers already know and use, just run faster and better by taking advantage of PC hardware through Windows."

Developers have always known that Microsoft has always had the capability to leverage its mastery of Windows APIs to build smoother applications. But as other Microsoft applications have weaned themselves off of the old Win32 dependencies, such as rendering using the old GDI and GDI+ libraries, Internet Explorer has fallen further and further behind. In fact, you could make the case that Silverlight gives Web developers opportunities to use the modern rendering libraries that IE should be using now natively.

Soliciting general developers' help in improving IE (some will say for the first time), Microsoft today began distributing the bare-bones chassis of the IE9 Web browser -- no frills, no features, not even bookmarks. Just a rendering engine in a window. With Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and now even Opera having made effective cases for the Web being "the platform," Microsoft desperately needs to resume defining the platform before someone else ends up defining it instead.

But one element of Microsoft's IE message remains the same even today: Those areas where the competitors say they have the advantage, may not be all that important to end users. Case in point: just-in-time compilation, the factor that has catapulted Mozilla Firefox and WebKit-based browsers such as Safari and Chrome into today's speed race.

For example, Hachamovitch did cite the IE9 chassis' speed improvement on the widely accepted SunSpider performance test, created by the originators of the open source WebKit engine. On Microsoft's chart, Opera is the fastest performer on the SunSpider, followed by a Chrome 5 dev build, a Chrome 4 stable build, and the latest Safari 4.0.5, released late last week by Apple (apologies for the fuzzy screenshot of Microsoft's chart). So yes, IE9 comes in fifth, rather than dead last. But the difference isn't that much of a difference, he said:

"It's interesting to note that the gap between IE9 and some of the other browsers to its right is about an eye-blink -- it's about 300 ms. And it took 70 seconds to identify that 300 ms difference."

When it comes to HTML 5, Microsoft wants to be perceived now as leading that standard. But with respect to standards at large, the company's position remains unchanged from last year: As long as Web standards are up in the air, compliance is a foggy term anyway. Today, Hachamovitch implied that if the goal of standards bodies were the same as Microsoft's goal of one language, the fog would be lifted:

"Developers want to use the same HTML, the same script, and the same markup across browsers. That's the goal of standards and interoperability. No need for different code paths for different browsers. That's a key goal for HTML 5. We love HTML 5 so much, we want it to actually work. In IE9, it will. We want the same HTML, the same script, the same markup to just work across browsers. So in IE9, we'll do for the rest of the Web platform what we did for CSS 2.1 in IE8. Now, at the same time, we want to be responsible about the standards that are still emerging, the standards that are in committee, and the standards that are partially implemented, often in different ways across browsers. So to make decisions on this front, we started from data."

As an Acid3 test runs in the background (it's not done yet), Dean Hachamovitch demonstrates how 'standards' support varies between even Firefox and Chrome (lower right) for the same markup.

The IE9 team leader went on to describe an internal tool that measured the script activity on 7,000 active Web sites. The telemetry that it received showed, for instance, that the #1 method in use was indexOf(), on 94% of sites measured. Number 17 on the list, used by 65% of sites, was addEventListener, a method that's key to W3C's advanced event registration model, but not yet supported in IE8.

"Because we started from data, what developers like you really use was our starting point for what to support." As a result, the IE9 chassis passed 578 out of 578 in the CSS3.info selectors test, putting it now on a par with Firefox. That's important, Hachamovitch noted, because developers want that one language -- one CSS, one HTML -- to work with for all browsers across the board.

Meanwhile, the IE9 preview posts a 55% score on the Acid3 standards compliance test -- up from 20% for IE8, and 12% for IE7. The latest stable Firefox, by comparison, scores 94% on this test; and Safari, Chrome, and Opera all score 100%. Could the CSS3.info test be fair, and the Acid3 test unfair?

"Some people use Acid3 as shorthand for standards support. Acid3 is kind of interesting, it exercises about a hundred details of a dozen different technologies. Some of them are under construction, others less so," Hachamovitch said. He added a promise that Acid3 scores will continue to improve "as we make more of the markup that developers actually use, work."

Next: Offloading processing to the background and to the GPU... Offloading processing to the background and to the GPU

The architectural development that helped Firefox and others vault from banana-like bars such as those on the left of Microsoft's SunSpider chart, to peanut-like bars like those on the right, was the implementation of just-in-time compilation (JIT) -- a concept first implemented in Java and .NET, re-engineered for JavaScript. Today, Hachamovitch's tactic was to characterize JIT compilers as "JIT-ters," complete with the wimpy sound and unstable connotations, similar to how AMD characterized Intel's introduction of "hyperthreading" five years ago.

"In the beginning, the Web had lots and lots of HTML, and little pieces of script here and there. And an interpreter was good enough for that. Over the years, different browsers have added JIT-ters and different kinds of JIT-ters, many different kinds of JIT-ters. The problem with JIT today is that so much time and energy goes into managing the time and scope that the JIT-ter operates in. Users have to wait if the JIT-ter JITs too much, because the JIT-ter is sitting there compiling the code, and you don't get to run it. And the user has to wait if the JIT-ter JITs too little, because then the JIT-ter did a little bit, and the user is stuck running a slower interpreter."

Something vaguely similar to the phenomenon Hachamovitch described is what we at Betanews have seen in a recent round of high-level browser testing, on IE and other platforms, in preparation for today's release of the IE9 tech preview. JavaScript interepreters, by today's design, are single-threaded. Their ability to run JavaScript very fast depends, to a great extent, on the relative complexity or simplicity of the instructions. JIT compilers produce much simpler machine code, but only in situations where the JavaScript instructions are relatively simple to parse, and not entangled in competing loops with unsightly timeouts. Long stretches of uniform code -- 100,000, one million, even ten million iterations -- are like butter candy to browsers like Chrome, smooth, silky, and easy to digest. But break up those instructions with interruptions (for instance, updates of an on-screen timer at one-second intervals), and what once seemed like butter now processes like rock-filled concrete. And sequences that Chrome could execute in under 30 seconds, all of a sudden, could take (by my estimate) days to execute if left unattended. It's in situations like this where the JIT-ter is jittering, to borrow Dean's phrasing. But about the only place you're going to find someone trying to do 10 million iterations of an algorithm in succession, is at Betanews, where the guy doing the testing is on his sixth cup of coffee and is jittery anyway.

Still, in anticipation of the types of advances Dean described today, we've been working to create a new class of tests that would enable IE9 to shine if it truly does what Dean says it does. Today, he described how IE9 moves the JavaScript interpreter to a background process:

"Compiling in the background puts hardware to use here without having to re-code the site. And the key here is to bring the best technology to the most important language you use, JavaScript."

HTML 5 in large print, SVG in small print

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a W3C standard since 1999, has never been actively supported by Internet Explorer even to this day. During today's demonstration of what he called, on the surface, "HTML 5 applications," Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch was joined onstage by Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky to jointly demonstrate the IE9 technical preview's new GPU-assisted graphics rendering support, with Sinofsky on the new browser and Hachamovitch playing catch-up with Chrome.

Tucked away in the background of that clever little duel was the fact that IE9 was, for the first time, directly and openly supporting SVG.

It's difficult to see from the screenshot of Microsoft's presentation above, but Sinofsky's IE9 browser at the upper left is rendering 100 simultaneous 3D extrapolations of 2D logos from various browsers, at 64 frames per second. Hachamovitch's Google Chrome, meanwhile, is rendering about 36 simultaneous logos at about 8 fps.

HTML 5 may have had little or nothing to do with this result. The real takeaway from this demo is the following: For years, Web developers have relied on Adobe Flash for vector graphics that are scalable, mainly since it's the only platform that can be plugged into all the major browsers and that can run uniformly within all of them. The reason for that is IE's reluctance to embrace SVG. Well, now that embracing SVG is necessary in order for Microsoft to demonstrate its graphics processing prowess, this could change the ballgame for Web developers, who may soon have at their disposal, at long last, a single open standard for animating Web sites.

Who better to celebrate that news with than the lovable Clippy character we all adored from Office XP? In a demonstration not only of processing prowess but of standards compliance, the two executives enlisted Clippy as the hero in a 3D game of Asteroids, where the targets were multi-colored circles of translucent plastic. Rendered properly, Clippy could hold his own; but stuck in Google Chrome, which doesn't appear to apply relative opacity properly, it looks like Clippy may be in trouble. And it looks like he's writing a letter of distress.

Microsoft has posted links to the tests Sinofsky and Hachamovitch demonstrated on stage, on its special site devoted to the IE9 developers' preview. There you're also likely to find the stunning IE9 video carousel, which HTML 5 has everything to do with. Here, four HD videos of underwater scenes are rendered on translucent screens, that simultaneously travel along an invisible carousel-like path. Of course, you may always have known this kind of rendering power existed in your GPU, but you might never have seen your Web browser go this far to exploit that power.

The IE team has always been careful to say that the advances that matter are the ones that users see and feel. Last year, the company advanced the argument that millisecond differences were imperceptible. Which they are, unless they become fruitful and multiply -- and in a Web applications environment, that will happen. The news from Las Vegas today is this: Microsoft is building a Web applications platform. Finally.

Newt Gingrich and Joe Scarborough have recently criticized a proposed legislative procedure to finalize health care reform as "radical" and "incredible," despite having supported the use of the same legislative process while they were members of Congress. The rule in question is an accepted part of House procedure, and in the years after Gingrich became speaker of the House and Scarborough was elected, Congress "set new records" for its use.

Gingrich: "Incredible" that House is "passing bills without voting on them." From a March 10 chief of staff for the House Rules Committee under Republican leadership, stated in a 2006 Roll Call column that the Republican Party "set new records" for its use of the self-executing rule in the years following Gingrich's ascension as Speaker:

Self-executing rules began innocently enough in the 1970s as a way of making technical corrections to bills. But, as the House became more partisan in the 1980s, the majority leadership was empowered by its caucus to take all necessary steps to pass the party's bills. This included a Rules Committee that was used more creatively to devise procedures to all but guarantee policy success. The self-executing rule was one such device to make substantive changes in legislation while ensuring majority passage.

When Republicans were in the minority, they railed against self-executing rules as being anti-deliberative because they undermined and perverted the work of committees and also prevented the House from having a separate debate and vote on the majority's preferred changes. From the 95th to 98th Congresses (1977-84), there were only eight self-executing rules making up just 1 percent of the 857 total rules granted. However, in Speaker Tip O'Neill's (D-Mass.) final term in the 99th Congress, there were 20 self-executing rules (12 percent). In Rep. Jim Wright's (D-Texas) only full term as Speaker, in the 100th Congress, there were 18 self-executing rules (17 percent). They reached a high point of 30 under Speaker Tom Foley (D-Wash.) during the final Democratic Congress, the 103rd, for 22 percent of all rules.

When Republicans took power in 1995, they soon lost their aversion to self-executing rules and proceeded to set new records under Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). There were 38 and 52 self-executing rules in the 104th and 105th Congresses (1995-1998), making up 25 percent and 35 percent of all rules, respectively. Under Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) there were 40, 42 and 30 self-executing rules in the 106th, 107th and 108th Congresses (22 percent, 37 percent and 22 percent, respectively). Thus far in the 109th Congress, self-executing rules make up about 16 percent of all rules.

On April 26 [2006], the Rules Committee served up the mother of all self-executing rules for the lobby/ethics reform bill. The committee hit the trifecta with not one, not two, but three self-executing provisions in the same special rule.

Scarborough voted for H.R. 384. The Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives report, the Congressional Research Service defined the self-executing rule as part of the House rulemaking process:

Starting about twenty-five years ago, in response to developments such as increased partisanship and uncertainty with respect to how long or controversial the amendment process on the floor might be, the Rules Committee began to issue more procedurally imaginative and complex rules.

Definition of "Self-Executing" Rule. One of the newer types is called a "self-executing" rule; it embodies a "two-for-one" procedure. This means that when the House adopts a rule it also simultaneously agrees to dispose of a separate matter, which is specified in the rule itself. For instance, self-executing rules may stipulate that a discrete policy proposal is deemed to have passed the House and been incorporated in the bill to be taken up. The effect: neither in the House nor in the Committee of the Whole will lawmakers have an opportunity to amend or to vote separately on the "self-executed" provision. It was automatically agreed to when the House passed the rule.

Self-executing rules require a vote. The CRS report makes clear that passage of a rule by the House is required for the "self-executed" provision to be adopted. Wolfensberger stated in his 2006 Roll Call column: "Almost every major bill must obtain a special rule, or resolution, from the Rules Committee permitting immediate floor consideration. The resolution also specifies the amount of general debate time and what amendments will be allowed. A special rule also may contain other bells, whistles, gizmos and gadgets.One of these optional attachments is a self-executing provision, which decrees a specified amendment to have been adopted upon the rule's passage [Emphasis added]. In other words, once the House adopts the special rule it effectively has adopted the amendment before the bill has even been called up for consideration [Emphasis added]."