In June 2003, The New Republic’s Michael Crowley wrote an exceptional article (exceptionally well-researched and exceptionally depressing) about the misery of being a Dem in the House of Representatives. Crowley explained that, for the first time that anyone can remember, lawmakers in the minority are told by the majority that they aren’t aloud to introduce legislation, they can’t offer amendments to bills, they’re blocked from generating media coverage, and they’re even denied access to public rooms on the Hill for meetings.
Crowley’s picture was bleak and discouraging for Dems, and a damning portrait of a power-drunk GOP majority that ignored traditions, flouted House rules, and rejected any semblance of bi-partisan cooperation. And, as it turns out, Crowley was just scratching the surface.
The Boston Globe, in one of the best multi-part research pieces I’ve ever seen, investigated how the legislative process works under this Republican Congress. The three-part series, called “Closed for Business,” was a devastating indictment of a corrupt system.
The Boston Globe investigation into back-room deals on Capitol Hill found that under the Republican-controlled Congress, longstanding rules and practices are ignored, and committees more often meet in secret. Members are less able to make changes to legislation on the House floor. Bills come up for votes so quickly that elected officials frequently don’t know what’s in them. And there is less time to discuss proposed laws before they come up for a vote.
It’s almost impossible to summarize all of the Globe’s findings. From legislation that lawmakers are told not to read, to secret committee sessions, to stunted debate, to unprecedented access for corporate lobbyists, the House Republicans more closely resembles an organized crime family than a functional political majority.
The predictable response from the right is that the Dems were just as bad when they were in the majority. As Kevin Drum explained in great detail yesterday, that’s just not true.
Yes, after running the Hill for over a generation, the Dems had grown complacent and overconfident by the early 1990s. They foolishly thought their majority status was permanent and stopped making strides to keep it that way.
But even at their most self-righteous, Dems never ran Congress the way the Republicans are running it now. Drum offered a terrific tale-of-the-tape.
* 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.
* Congressional conference committees, 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.
* The House Rules Committee frequently decides bills in hastily called, late-night “emergency” sessions, despite House rules requiring that the panel convene during regular business hours and give panel members 48 hours notice. So far in the current Congress, 54 percent of bills have been drawn up in “emergency” sessions, according to committee staff members.
* Historically, bills have been given a three-day delay in between the time the Rules Committee reports them out and the House takes them up; that requirement has been waived on numerous occasions in recent years.
* While the House typically meets for 140 or more legislative days each year — reaching a recent historical high of 167 days in 1995, the first year of the Newt Gingrich-led GOP majority — it has met for legislative business just 97 days this year, with only five more days of work scheduled for the year. If no additional days are scheduled, the 102 days would be the lowest in decades.
* And we can add to that the Republican habit of keeping House votes open long past the normal 15-minute maximum. Democrats did this once in 1987 and Republicans screamed foul, even though that vote was held open for a mere extra 20 minutes and was due to an odd mixup, not a desire to bludgeon holdouts into changing their votes. Since the Republicans took over in 1994, they’ve held votes open past the 15-minute limit over a dozen times, climaxing in the infamous 3-hour vote at 3 am on the Medicare bill last year.
It took Dems 40 years to get fat-and-happy with their power. The GOP did it in just 10.
Maybe that could be the new Republican motto: Four times the corruption in one-fourth the time!