Friday, December 03, 2004
Lord Acton was a very smart guy
Lord Acton, of course, is responsible for the adage "absolute power corrupts absolutely," which is certainly applicable to the present GOP majority of our government. With control of the two "elected" branches of government as well as a majority on SCOTUS, the GOP for the next two years has the fate of public policy in its hands.
Here's an excerpt from the Boston Globe at what they have done since taking over the House in 1994.
Here's an excerpt from the Boston Globe at what they have done since taking over the House in 1994.
- The House Rules Committee, which is meant to tweak the language in bills that come out of committee, sometimes rewrites key passages of legislation approved by other committees, then forbids members from changing the bills on the floor. Only five times this year were House members allowed to amend policy bills on the floor, and only 15 percent of bills this year were open to amendment. For the entire 108th Congress, just 28 percent of total bills have been open to amendment -- barely more than half of what Democrats allowed in their last session in power in 1993-94. Further, the Rules Committee has blocked floor votes on legislation opposed by the Bush administration but supported by a majority of the House. For example, a bill to extend benefits to the long-term unemployed has been kept off the House floor despite what backers say is the support of a bipartisan majority.
- The Rules Committee commonly holds sessions late at night or in the wee hours of the morning, earning the nickname "the Dracula Congress" by critical Democrats and keeping some lawmakers quite literally in the dark about the legislation put before them. On the Patient's Bill of Rights legislation in 2001, for example, the Rules Committee made a one-word change in the middle of the night that drastically limited the liability of HMOs that deny coverage to their patients. The measure was hustled through the House hours later, with few lawmakers aware of the change.
- Congressional conference committees, charged with reconciling differences between House- and Senate-passed versions of the same legislation, have become dramatically more powerful in shaping bills. The panels, made up of a small group of lawmakers appointed by leaders in both parties, added a record 3,407 "pork barrel" projects to appropriations bills for this year's federal budget, items that were never debated or voted on beforehand by the House and Senate and whose congressional patrons are kept secret. This compares to just 47 projects added in conference committee in 1994, the last year of Democratic control.
- Bills are increasingly crafted behind closed doors, and on two major pieces of legislation -- the Medicare and energy bills -- few Democrats were allowed into the critical conference committee meetings, sessions that historically have been bipartisan. The energy bill -- a sweeping package meant to lay out a national energy policy -- started in closed-door meetings held by Vice President Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force and was written in private sessions on Capitol Hill that excluded all Democrats. On the Medicare negotiations, only two Democrats -- both already supportive of the bill -- were included.
- The amount of time spent openly debating bills has dropped dramatically, and lawmakers are further hamstrung by an abbreviated schedule that gives them little time to fully examine a bill before voting on it. The House typically holds no votes until Tuesday evenings -- and then usually on noncontroversial items such as the renaming of post offices -- then adjourns for the week by Thursday afternoon. The Iraq war resolution was debated just two days in 2002; the defense authorization bill, which customarily undergoes weeks of floor discussion, was debated and voted on this year in two days.
# posted by mouldfan : 3:19 PM
