Is “Deem and Pass” As Unprecedented As Right-Wingers Claim?

Apparently not. Republicans used it in the past as have Democrats.

In fact, self-executing rules are relatively common in the House. For instance, the chamber employed the procedure on Feb. 3, 2010, to adopt a Senate amendment to a resolution concerning increasing the statutory limit on federal debt. The procedure was used 36 times by the House Republican leadership between 2005 and 2006 and 49 times by the Democratic leadership between 2007 and 2008, according to Brookings Institution congressional scholar Thomas Mann writing for Politico.

[…]

Norm Ornstein, another leading congressional scholar with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, pointed out that the Republicans used a very similar tactic to what the Democrats are now proposing in 2006. At the time, they used a self-executing rule to pass $38.8 billion in budget cuts without having to vote on an immigration measure.

So, there’s a whole lot of precedence for the individual tactics Democrats are proposing to use, though the specific combination of a self-executing rule and reconciliation is a bit unusual, said Jim Horney, a budget expert at the left-leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

“There’s nothing about [the process] that’s dramatically at odds with the way things get done,” Horney said. “With almost every bill, you can find some way in which the circumstances are a little different. But to imply that it’s somehow a big departure from the way things are done could be wrong.”

Source

But of course, PolitiFact.com is a liberal site since reality has a liberal bias. 🙂