UPDATED: 5:47 P.M.

As I noted below, Democrats on the House Rules Committee are considering adopting a special rule that would allow the House to “deem” the Senate health-care bill to have been passed by the very act of voting on reconciliation fixes to it.

This is all a bit obscure, so let me try to put it as clearly as I can. This move would solve for House Democrats the problem of acting first. It would allow the House to pass a reconciliation measure on the health-care bill (complete with fixes to the Cadillac Tax etc.) without first passing the Senate version. It would thus defuse mitigate the threat — ingeniously pounded into the heads of rank-and-file House Democrats by Senate Republican leadership — that the House could pass the Senate bill only to be double-crossed by the Senate on the sidecar. And, worse, that the president could sign the Senate bill into law, leaving wavering House members on the hook for supporting it.

That’s the rub on the politics of this thing, and I wouldn’t blame you for stopping right here. But those of you who are procedural masochists might be wondering how the process itself would work.

Well, each bill brought to the floor of the House is debated under its own “rule” setting the length and structure of debate, including which if any amendments can be considered. A given bill’s rule is created by the — you guessed it — Rules Committee and presented to the whole House for a simple majority vote prior to consideration of the bill itself. In this case, the Democrats would bring a “self-executing rule” to the floor that allowed for the adoption of the Senate bill when, and only when, the reconciliation sidecar is passed, thereby avoiding the need to bring the Senate bill to the floor for a separate up-or-down vote.

What exactly is a self-executing rule? CRS gets into the nitty gritty, calling it 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.

Last year, House Democrats used a “self-executing rule” to push through the controversial Waxman Amendment to the cap-and-trade bill. In that case, after weeks of committee mark-up and debate on one version of the bill, a special rule was brought to the House at 3:47 A.M. on the morning of the final vote, which in effect scrapped the existing bill and replaced it with a new version from Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.), including a never-before-seen 309-page amendment, the adoption of which was self-executed by the narrow (217-205) adoption of the rule.

Remember, House rules aren’t supposed to set policy, they are supposed to set the terms for debate. But the rule on the Waxman proposal guaranteed its passage, without debate or opportunity for amendment.

Here’s how former House Rules Committee staff director DonWolfensberger described that process:

Despite the fact that few Members had a clue as to what was in the new bill as modified by Waxman’s amendment, the rule was called up just six hours after it had been reported. The rule squeaked by, 217-205, and the bill subsequently passed later that day by an even slimmer margin, 219-212.

Nor was the Waxman Amendment a lone case. Indeed, a similar trick has been used to increase the national debt for years, under the so-called “Gephardt Rule” (House Rule XXVII) adopted by the last House Democratic majority. The rule states that upon passage of each year’s budget resolution, a concurrent resolution raising the debt limit by the amount required in that budget is automatically considered passed, thus sparing members separate, potentially embarrassing votes on increasing government borrowing.

Unlike in the Senate, where individual Senators have broad discretion to steer debate and introduce amendments, the legislative process in the House is rigidly governed by the Rules Committee. This limits the Republicans’ options in fighting a self-executing rule for Obamacare. As one Republican House staffer put it to me today, “the Committee can do just about anything if they can get the votes to pass the rule.”

And the Senate was supposed to be undemocratic, right?

UPDATE: Ramesh points me to John Dickerson at Slate, who argues that the Slaughter Rule could also be used to take pressure off the Stu-packers:

. . .Democrats who think the Senate bill doesn’t sufficiently limit abortion rights would never have to be on record as having voted for it. (Because the Senate abortion language can’t be fixed in [the reconciliation bill] for procedural reasons, some Democratic aides say there is talk about a later bill that would handle these issues.)

UPDATE II: I think I was slightly too bold in suggesting that a self-executing rule would defuse the threat of a Senate double-cross. If the House still has to go first for technical reasons (e.g. Senator Conrad’s comments that you can’t reconcile the budget with a law that hasn’t passed both houses yet), then there is still the structural possibility of the sidecar dying in the Senate, and of the president signing the Senate bill without amendment.

But the move could still be bandied about as a show of bicameral good faith, while providing enough cover to wavering rank-and-filers for House leadership to get to 216 votes.