Just last week, the New York Times ran a lengthy item about how much better Congress, and particularly the House, will function under the new Democratic majority. It all sounded quite pleasant — no more middle-of-the-night votes on key bills, no more restrictions on the minority offering amendments, no more single-party conference committees.
Indeed, as a sign of good faith, Nancy Pelosi helped Dennis Hastert get a better office-space assignment, and reached out to House Minority Leader John Boehner to help create a task force on congressional ethics rules and supervision of the page program. It’s a new day in a new Congress, and Democrats are poised to run the place as it should be run.
That is, just as soon as Dems check a few items off their to-do list.
As they prepare to take control of Congress this week and face up to campaign pledges to restore bipartisanship and openness, Democrats are planning to largely sideline Republicans from the first burst of lawmaking.
House Democrats intend to pass a raft of popular measures as part of their well-publicized plan for the first 100 hours. They include tightening ethics rules for lawmakers, raising the minimum wage, allowing more research on stem cells and cutting interest rates on student loans.
But instead of allowing Republicans to fully participate in deliberations, as promised after the Democratic victory in the Nov. 7 midterm elections, Democrats now say they will use House rules to prevent the opposition from offering alternative measures, assuring speedy passage of the bills and allowing their party to trumpet early victories.
According to the Post piece, a few House Dems complained over the weekend when party leaders settled on this strategy, worried that it might make the new majority look like the old majority. The concerns were apparently rejected.
For a party that hasn’t played hard ball in a long while, I’m pleasantly surprised Dems remember how.
The context of the 100-hour rules matters. Dems spent the better part of the 2006 campaign cycle promising to anyone who would listen that they’d pass a certain, limited legislative agenda at the outset of the 110th Congress. The bills on the agenda aren’t exactly new — they’ve been part of the policy debate on the Hill for years. Minimum wage has been debated. Stem-cell research has been debated. Interest on student loans has been debated. It’s not as if the new Democratic majority was going to overhaul the national health care system without any committee hearings; the 100-hour agenda has already been the process.
Democratic leaders said they are not going to allow Republican input into the ethics package and other early legislation, because several of the bills have already been debated and dissected, including the proposal to raise the minimum wage, which passed the House Appropriations Committee in the 109th Congress, said Brendan Daly, a spokesman for Pelosi.
“We’ve talked about these things for more than a year,” he said. “The members and the public know what we’re voting on. So in the first 100 hours, we’re going to pass these bills.” […] “The test is not the first 100 hours,” he said. “The test is the first six months or the first year. We will do what we promised to do.”
Keep in mind, the 1,500-word front-page piece in the Post was noteworthy for what it didn’t include: a single complaint from a congressional Republican. Not one GOP lawmaker expressed outrage at the Democrats’ plan to push through a relatively modest 100-hour agenda. I’m not exactly surprised — House Republicans no doubt expected this, and for that matter, they can’t very well complain about Dems using the rules temporarily exactly the way Republicans used them permanently.
I have a hard time criticizing the Dems for following through on their promise to pass these bills. Elections have consequences.