It wouldn't be an equal comparison though. ACA had a ton of hearings and numerous amendments from the minority party. it was just so damn long no one was reading the whole thing. That doesn't make it right, but it is not the same thing as refusing to let the minority party or the public even SEE the bill.
Presumably we will see the bill and there will be debate, etc., before it is passed.
Yes, if the Republicans do some parliamentary trick to pass whatever it is before it is publicized and without any debate or allowing amendment proposals, that would indeed be taking things further than recent practice. Let's see what happens.
Publicizing it, allowing debate, but then using majority rules to say "don't care what you think, we're passing what we want" would merely continue the status quo.
McConnell has already gone on record that they will NOT allow this to go to committee, that there will only be 10 hrs to debate, read the whole bill and propose any amendments. Compare that to the ACA The ACA had a historic number of hours of debate and amendments during Committee development of the legislations. The House process spanned three committees - Energy and Commerce, Ways and means, and Education and Labor - with dozens of hearings over many months.
Specifically, the House held 79 bipartisan hearings and markups on the health reform bill over the period of an entire year.
House members spent nearly 100 hours in hearings, heard from 181 witnesses from both sides of the aisle, considered 239 amendments (
both Democratic and Republican), and accepted 121 amendments (many of which were republican).
The Senate held dozens of public meetings and hearings in both the Finance and HELP Committees and
accepted hundreds of Republican amendments. The HELP Committee held 14 bipartisan roundtables, 13 bipartisan hearings, and 20 bipartisan walkthroughs on health reform. The HELP Committee considered nearly 300 amendments and
accepted more than 160 Republican amendments.The Finance Committee held 17 roundtables, summits, and hearings on health reform. The Finance Committee also held 13 member meetings and walkthroughs and 38 meetings and negotiations for a total of 53 meetings on health reform. [Senate Finance Committee, 5/3/10] The Finance Committee held a seven-day markup of the bill, the longest Finance Committee markup in 22 years,
resulting in a bipartisan 14-to-9 vote to approve the bill. [Senate Finance Committee, 5/3/10] The Finance Committee markup resulted in
41 amendments to revise the bill, including 18 by unanimous consent or without objection. [Senate Finance Committee, 10/13/09] The financing of the ACA's coverage provisions was well known and debated. When the bill came to the floor, the Senate spent 25 consecutive days in session on health reform, the second longest consecutive session in history. In total, the Senate spent more than 160 hours considering the health reform legislation.
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office issued many reports on the Affordable Care Act's financing, clearly showing that revenue would be raised by the personal responsibility provision, also known at the individual mandate or free-rider penalty, in every case that it described the law's coverage provisions. [CBO, 12/10; The Washington Post, 9/24/14; ASPE, 9/24/14]
CBO also wrote extensively about how a properly-functioning insurance market would work as designed under the ACA. The entire purpose of insurance is to balance out the risk of healthy and non-healthy enrollees; anyone who believes that this point was avoided during debate of the ACA was simply not paying attention to advocates of the law as they described it during the many public hearings the law received.
So no, what is being done now is not status quo and the ACA was not "don't care what you think, we're passing what we want". It just became something the GOP figured out to say after having a hand in all of it and pulled their members to vote no, instead of adjustment, after getting much of what they wanted via compromise BECAUSE they had become a group that compromise was a bad word.
