Democratic Obstruction

I note that any time you have the party of Limbaugh, Hannity, Delay in power, when the public grows weary of their failure to legislate effectively, it will always be the other side’s fault. When Iraq is over and done with, these people will blame Democrats for its failure, just like they have by laying the failure of Vietnam on the doorsteps of anti-war protestors. Ex-GIs don’t hold any sway, regardless of how many join in the protest, as to this crowd there’s absolutely zero chance that their failure to lead the country in any aspect of government has anything to do with their own actions. So now we have the argument that Congress has been a failure because of the obstruction of Democrats. Here are some facts to chew on:

1. July 17, 2003 – House Ways & Means Committee – Portman-Cardin Pension Bill – The bill that had been agreed upon by both sides of the committee was substituted just prior to midnight by Rep. Bill Thomas (R-CA) who informed everyone that it would be voted on the following day. Committee Democrats met in a room to craft a Democratic alternative, which prompted Thomas to call the Capitol Hill police to run the Democrats out. Like many pieces of legislation put to vote by Republicans in this Congress, there was no time to review the bill or propose ammendments. The problem with this bill was it “would allow companies to reduce the amount of money they have to set aside to meet future obligations to defined benefit plan participants.” Basically it would allow them to cook the books, then down the road move to do what the airlines did by shifting pension responsibilities to the government. I wrote about this a while back: “To inflate earnings companies predict high returns on their pension funds whether they are realistic or not. By predicting a high rate of return, more money can be redirected from the pension funds to the balance sheet, creating higher earnings and investment. A fund can legally be predicted to make a return of 8%, come in at under 1% and the next year be predicted to again come in at 8%…When this happens, the federal program (PBGC) picks up the slack and provides the workers a portion of what they should have received from the company they worked for. In 2001 PBGC reported a surplus of $8 billion, but last year it reported a deficit of $23 billion.”
2. The Patriot Act – Originally crafted in the House Judiciary Committee and approved by a 36-0 vote. The bill is sent to the Rules Committee, where Republicans “simply chucked the approved bill and replaced it with a new, far more repressive version, apparently written at the direction of then Attourney general John Ashcroft”. The Rules Committee rejected ammendments, denied the chance for up or down votes within the committee, and the Ashcroft version went to the floor.
3. Of the 111 rules introducted in the first session of this Congress, only twelve were open. On the opening day of the 104th Congress, then-Rules Committee chairman Gerald Solomon announced his intention to institute free debate on the floor. “Instead of having seventy percent closed rules, we are going to have seventy percent open and unrestricted rules.” That was 1995, in response to Democratic power having turned an 85% rate in 1977 to 30% in 1994. So from Solomon’s statement in ’95 to today, the rate is 10.8%. Even Democrats at their worst (30% is horrible for an open democracy), aren’t as nasty as Republicans today.
4. Subpoenas – From the 1950s until the GOP takeover in 1995, no Democratic committee chairman issued a subpoena without either minority consent or a committee vote. In the Clinton years, Republicans got rid of that standard and issued 1000+ and went over 2 million pages of documents to find Democratic crimes, misappropriations, coverups, etc. Since George W. Bush became President, this same Congress has issued ZERO. With reasons for going to war with Iraq, no-bid contracts, Katrina…they’ve found NOTHING worthy of a hearing or investigation!?!?!

Those are a few examples out of many. It’s interesting to study the differences between the creators of our democracy, what they intended for Congress to do, and what it is today. Anything the President wants, he gets, and oversight is a thing of the past. There are no checks and zero ballance. This is not the fault of a minority party.