WASHINGTON – Senator Chuck Grassley today gave tepid support to an ethics reform bill that passed the Senate. The bill passed by a vote of 83-14. Grassley voted for the bill.
“The process with which this transparency bill was put together was about as far from transparent as you can get. I voted for it, because in the end it’s better than where we are now,” Grassley said. “The fact of the matter is that two people, one not even a member of the Senate, re-wrote the provisions of an ethics bill that passed the Senate by a large margin, and now they have put up procedural roadblocks so others can’t offer amendments that just might clean up some of the ill-conceived ideas that have been put forward.”
Grassley was particularly concerned about a provision to end the practice of secret holds in the Senate that he had pushed to include in the ethics bill. The provision was included in this year’s version of the bill when it passed the Senate in January. The original provision
required a Senator who places a hold to make it public within three days was included in the Senate version of lobbying reform legislation. The rewritten provision being considered today gives senators six legislative days to disclose their hold only after a unanimous consent request is made and objected to anonymously on the senator’s behalf.
Grassley also said the earmarks provisions in the bill are weaker than the Senate originally passed.
For example, the bill passed in January would have given the nonpartisan Parliamentarian the authority to determine compliance with earmark reform. The Ethics Reform bill passed today now gives the Majority Leader or the Appropriations Committee chairman the power to determine if the bill complies with the rules. The bill passed in January also allowed for earmarks inserted at the dead of night in the conference committee to each be challenged. The bill passed today now allows earmarks to be inserted at conference time, and with only 41 votes needed to protect each earmark from individual scrutiny.
Grassley is one of a handful of Senators who already makes available the list of projects he forwards on behalf of Iowans to the Appropriations Committee. The list can be found on his website, http://grassley.senate.gov .
Here is a copy of Grassley’s prepared
statement given today in the Senate.
Madam President,
I'm rising to speak against the compromise that deals with the issue of secret holds, and I would agree with the senator from California, the distinguished chairman of the committee, that what we have in this report is probably better than what we have today because secret holds are secret and nobody knows who's holding a bill and the public's business ought to be public, and it isn't today.
But I do take exception
to what's before us -- in regard to secret holds for the simple reason that there wasn't any necessity whatsoever to compromise because secret holds are rules of the senate or procedures in the senate, and this body spoke with 84 votes in favor of what Senator Wyden and I put before the senate. And basically, this makes it so liberal that it's practically meaningless what we're doing about secret holds.
Article I, section 5 of the Constitution of the United States reads, in part,
“Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings...”
That means that the House of Representatives has no say whatsoever about the Senate’s rules. So, when the Senate debates and passes changes to its rules that should be the final word. That’s what happened with the House’s package of rules changes that body passed early in this Congress.
However, since the Ethics Reform Bill that the Senate passed in January also contained changes to the Lobbying Disclosure Act and other laws, the entire bill needs to pass both houses of Congress and be signed by the President to take effect.
Nevertheless, that does not change the fact that, under the Constitution, only the Senate determines its own rules and procedures.
What has happened is that the Senate had a full, open debate about the proposed changes to the Senate rules in the Ethics Reform Bill. Amendments were offered and voted on, then the entire Senate voted on the final package.
Now we have a situation where the Majority Leader of the Senate and the Speaker of the House rewrote major provisions in this package behind closed doors, including rewriting Senate rules that had already passed the full Senate.
One provision that was changed was the provision that Senator Wyden and I have worked on for years to end the practice of keeping holds secret. The public’s business ought to be kept public and any senator that's got guts enough to put a hold on a bill ought to be willing to stand up and say who you are
.
Only in the Senate can a single member prevent legislation or nominations from being considered using a so called “hold.”
Holds do not exist in the House at all.
Senator Wyden and I were successful in passing an amendment to last year’s Ethics Reform Bill by a vote of 84-13 to require public disclosure of holds. That bill was never enacted, but the identical provision was included in the Ethics bill passed by the full Senate in January.
Senator Wyden and I pushed for that provision because we believe that the public’s business ought to be done in public.
Any senator has a right to object to unanimous consent to proceeding to a matter.
Senators have every right to object to any unanimous consent request publicly, but I see no legitimate reason why senators should be able to be secret about what they're doing here in the United States Senate.
It has been my policy for years to place a brief statement in the Congressional Record each time I place a hold with a short explanation why I placed the hold.
It has never hurt me a bit and senators should have no fear of such a requirement.
The Senate has spoken in passing our very well thought out provision.
I should add that this provision was written with the help and advice of Senator Lott and Senator Byrd, both former Majority Leaders with much valuable insight about how the Senate works.
Now, even though the Senate has already spoken as a body on this matter, a single senator has single-handedly rewritten part of this provision overriding what I consider overwhelming support in the United States Senate to end secret holds.
In the version the Senate passed, we allowed three days for senators to submit a simple public disclosure form for the Record, just like adding a cosponsor to a bill.
The intent is not that it is somehow legitimate to keep a hold secret for three days, but we wanted to give senators ample time to get their disclosure to the floor to be entered in the Record.
The rewritten provision gives senators 6 legislative days.
It is absurd to think that senators need over a week to send an intern down to the floor with a simple form.
Of greater concern is that the rewritten language requires senators to disclose a hold only after a unanimous consent request is made and objected to anonymously on the senator’s behalf, and then they have six days to do so.
That’s too late!
By that point, particularly at the end of a session, it's going to make this process meaningless. By that point, a hold could have existed for some time, perhaps without the sponsor of the bill even realizing it.
Furthermore, since the Majority Leader controls the Senate schedule, he would hardly object to his own request to bring up a bill or nominee. He would simply not bring up a bill or nominee being held up by a member of his own party.
If a member of the minority party were to attempt to ask unanimous consent to proceed to a matter, the Majority Leader would object on his own behalf to protect the majority leader’s prerogative to set the agenda and any secret holds by members of the majority party would remain secret.
Mr. President, I'm deeply disappointed that this provision that Senator Wyden and I worked so hard on for several years to finally pass, which got a vote of 84 members of this body last year, was altered behind closed doors. It was almost a fait accompli when the leaders of this body agreed to put it in the bill in January. I thought they got the message. Well, who's forgotten that they got the message that they had to change this?
That's what's so irritating. I'm going to vote for this bill, but this was something that didn't need to be in a bill. It didn't need to be negotiated. This was decided by the vast majority of the senate. But do you know what it tells me?
There are still people around here that don't want the public's business to be public. They want to do things in secret. They don't have guts enough to say they want to hold up a bill, so we end up with this convoluted provision where it isn't even kicked in until after there's an attempt by somebody to ask unanimous consent to bring a bill up and then at that point senators have six days after that. So I've stated my piece. I'm not very happy. I hope Senator Wyden is as unhappy as I am, and we'll try to do something in the future.