Douglas Turner: Democrats’ handling of bill is disgraceful
WASHINGTON — The Kona beer, sake, lomi lomi salmon and the Kalua pig served up to members of Congress, their staffs and more than 1,500 others at President Obama’s Hawaiian luau at the White House put Democrats in a mellow mood.
Fortune was merry. Everything was possible on June 25. And so, House Democratic leaders and staff glided back to their offices around 9 that Thursday night, well fortified for hours of frenzied piecework.
Considering their responsibilities, they were confederates in perhaps the most unscrupulous business seen in the Capitol in decades. Their task was to stuff 309 pages of amendments, essentially written in secret, into the Obama administration’s climate and energy bill.
Passed by a one-vote majority only a few hours later, the bill is the most far-reaching, intrusive and expensive measure seen here since the 1930s.
But before this 1,429-page environmental bill reached the House floor, it had to be cleared by the House Rules Committee, which is chaired by Rep. Louise M. Slaughter, D-Fairport. Her Rules Committee is the gatekeeper for all legislation.
It was Slaughter’s job to oversee the patching and the stitching of these 309 pages into this labyrinthine bill in the middle of the night. She had called an “emergency meeting” of the panel, controlled by Democrats, for around 2:30 a. m.
Democratic staffers of key House committees worked behind closed doors from 9 p. m. until 2:30 Friday morning, bowing to special interests and struggling to make things fit the Congressional Budget Office. Until now a reputable bipartisan agency, it was sucked into this scheme. In the wee hours, the CBO was forced to quickly rustle up a price tag for capping carbon emissions from homes, offices, cars, trucks, plants and hospitals for the next 40 years, with these new 309 pages in mind.
The handful of minority Republicans on the panel saw their amendments summarily defeated. Around 3 a. m., Slaughter gaveled the bill a wrap. It was hustled around the corner to the Government Printing Office. This mammoth document in printed form wasn’t on the House floor until late Friday morning.
Since early May, there have been hearings on some aspects of the bill. But there was no public hearing on the legislation furtively reconfigured by Rules Committee Democrats when everyone but barflies was sleeping. Worse, only a handful of members on the floor Friday evening had any working knowledge of the bill they were being pressured to support or oppose.
What the House produced was bad enough: A climate bill that would impose heavy utility costs on hard-pressed families and employers, and bloat the federal bureaucracy without cutting greenhouse gasses in a meaningful way.
What has already polluted Congress and the nation is the way the Democrats manipulated this massive bill in the dead of night. Slaughter has declined this column’s written request to comment on whether the ends justify the means, and that’s her business, of course.
But she and her boss, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., did a lot of loud complaining about a Republican “culture of corruption” when Slaughter and Pelosi were in the minority, battling to regain power. On a victorious Election Night 2006, Pelosi vowed to end GOP “corruption” and move the House to a new level of democracy, courtesy and transparency.
What they have done instead is drag the House down to new depths of pride and imperiousness. A taste of this arrogance came Friday evening when an author of the bill, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., sneeringly moved technical points of order “twice” to stop Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, from trying to read the new bill to baffled members.
It’s up to the Senate to clean the bill up, if possible.
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