The Misery of Being a House Democrat. This is an article by Michael Crowley
Post date: 06.12.03 on the New Republic on Line.
THE LACK OF REPORTING ON THIS CRAP BY CORPORATE MEDIA IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT.
IF THE PUBLIC WAS MORE INFORMED ON THE REPUBLICAN PARTY'S FRIGHTENING FACILITY FOR THE TECHNIQUES OF TOTALITARIANISM MAYBE SOME OF THESE ELECTIONS WOULD REFLECT MORE SENSIBLE RESULTS. THIS HELPS ENORMOUSLY IN FEEDING THE NOTION THAT SOME HAVE THAT THE DEMOCRATS ARE HAPLESS NIT-WITS WITH NO IDEAS. THE MEDIA IS COMPLICIT IN THIS DISINFORMATION AND SHOULD BE CALLED OUT ON IT. PLEASE READ THE ARTICLE AND THEN GO TO
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/dbq/media/">Congress.org and email all media and call them to account for not reporting an extremely important political development which started with Tom Delay's reign of terror in the HOuse.
There is more to politics than just the damn elections! PLEASE EMAIL ALL MEDIA OUTLETS ON THIS. Use parts of this article as ammunition.
Nothing agonizes House Democrats more than the perception that they don't even put up a fight. And, for this, they have a culprit almost as loathsome as Tom DeLay: the media. This dilemma was never more clear than on May 14, when a group of more than a dozen House Democrats, led by Bernie Sanders of Vermont (an independent in name but a loyal Democrat in practice), organized a press conference on a subject of urgent concern to them: an upcoming Federal Communications Commission ruling on media consolidation. The Democrats assembled and waited for the reporters. And waited. None showed up. None, that is, until a scribe from Roll Call hurried over to cover the humiliating spectacle of a press conference with no press.
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"The press has been disgracefully acquiescent," says Frank. "Democrats these days are told by other Democrats, who are not full-time in politics, `Well, we're disappointed. We don't hear much from you.'" One reason for this, Democrats say, is that the press doesn't write about the procedural tactics the GOP employs to quash opposition. The public often assumes Democrats rolled over in cases when they were, in fact, steamrolled. "The press won't cover Rules or Rules Committee votes," says Sirota. "It's process--but it's tantamount to substance."
]Shrewdly, Republicans make process stories especially unappealing to reporters. The Rules Committee, for instance, often considers controversial bills late at night, long after the evening news and even newspaper deadlines. "They intentionally do things late at night so they can sneak things through," says Frost, who has dubbed this the "Vampire Congress." Another aide offers a blunter assessment, one borne of obvious bitterness: "The press is pretty goddamn lazy. In order to write about the Rules Committee would mean that you actually have to learn something about rules and procedures. And the press just doesn't do that."
What truly drives Democrats berserk, however, are media reports declaring that "the Congress" has passed a bill, without any mention of even the most furious Democratic opposition. "We're out there organizing press conferences, fighting them on the floor, debating them nonstop," says a leadership aide, "and what you read in the press is, `The Congress passed this,' `The Congress passed that,' and you don't even hear about the opposition." Last month's tax-cut bill offered a case study in the way Democratic resistance often amounts to so much Kabuki theater. With the House GOP pushing a $550 billion tax cut, House Democrats fought the legislation intensely and demanded that a vote be allowed on their own $150 billion plan. On the day of the vote, Charles Rangel, the perpetually hoarse senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, led the fight. "What we are trying to do is have an alternative!" hollered Rangel. "That's not the Republican way, that's not the Democratic way, that's the American way! ... We're not asking to win, we're merely asking to be heard." But Republicans only allowed an absurd one hour of debate, and, in the end, Democrats didn't get a vote on their alternative bill. Nor did many Americans hear about their fight. With the House preparing to vote, a glum Democratic leadership aide lingered in a lobby off the House floor. "It's been a depressing day," she confessed. "I'm just out here to badger any reporters into including a paragraph--a paragraph--on our alternative. But I don't see anyone." The next day, The New York Times did include such a paragraph (after 14 others on the Republican plan), but The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and two of the three major network news shows made little or no mention of the Democrats' protests.
AND ON REPUBLICAN TOTALITARIAN TACTICS ALMOST TOTALLY UNREPORTED BY THE CORPORATE MEDIA (including PBS): To an outsider, the haplessness of the House Democrats might seem curious. Proportionally speaking, after all, the House is split about as evenly as the Senate. (The GOP holds a 229-206 House majority--which works out to about the same 52-48 ratio as the Republican-controlled Senate.) But, while Senate Democrats wield real influence, there's often little evidence that House Democrats even exist. That's largely because the Senate is designed to allow individual senators vast power to block nominations and delay floor proceedings. The House, by contrast, offers its leaders enormous power and its rank-and-file members almost none. And, in part because their narrow majority allows so little room for error, Republicans have done a masterful job of exploiting undemocratic mechanisms, such as the Rules Committee, and enforcing a militant party discipline that renders the Democrats irrelevant. "They essentially rig the game," says David Sirota, Democratic spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee. The result is a House that routinely rubber-stamps the White House's agenda and puts immense pressure on the Senate to do the same.
House Republicans exercise their absolute power in ways ranging from the grand to the trivial. Most significant is their stranglehold on the legislative process. In committees, Democratic amendments are unwelcome, even those from senior Democrats brimming with expertise. (When the House passed an energy bill earlier this year, John Dingell, a 47-year House veteran who once chaired the Energy and Commerce Committee, was allowed almost no role in shaping the bill.) When a bill is ready to come to the House floor, Rules often decrees that Democrats can't offer a substitute bill of their own. When the House voted last year on a prescription-drug benefit, for instance, the Democratic plan never got a vote, leaving the party legislatively mute on one of its top issues. As for amendments, Rules routinely snuffs out Democratic offerings that have any hope of passing or that might make GOP moderates squirm. During debate on last year's defense appropriations bill, Rules sanctioned just two of 40 proposed Democratic amendments. When House Republicans passed a worker-training bill this spring, they dropped language preventing discrimination on the basis of religious belief. That language was critically important to liberals, but Democrats weren't allowed to force a vote on that central issue; anyone who wanted to protest had to cast a Scroogish vote against the overall bill.
Legislative control can take subtler forms, too. Some Democrats suspect that, in recent years, GOP leaders have intentionally delayed work on annual spending bills. The idea, they say, is to force a last-minute flurry of budgeting that allows Democrats little chance to fight for their priorities. "Last year, they jammed it all into one omnibus bill at the last minute so we didn't have a chance to vote on a lot of individual programs," says Texas Democrat Martin Frost, who notes that budget work is again behind schedule this year. This budget strategy has also helped enable Republicans to kill off the pet budget projects of politically vulnerable Democrats. "They've started to get partisan about those things the last couple of years," says a former top House Democratic policy aide. "They yanked out projects"--such as legitimate infrastructure spending--"that you would never have had a problem with" in the past.
Republicans also put Democrats at a disadvantage by hoarding legislative information. Democrats often don't even see the text of major bills until a few hours before they're expected to vote on them. (Neither do many Republicans--but they, naturally, find far less in such bills to complain about.) The final text of the 3,000-page omnibus budget bill that so galled Frost, for instance, emerged just hours before the House passed it. Meanwhile, Dingell complains that Republicans announce committee hearings on short notice, making it harder for Democrats to call friendly witnesses to testify. "From their perspective, they don't need to tell us anything. We're fundamentally not part of the process," says a Democratic leadership aide.
To the most hard-line Republicans, giving Democrats any legislative role is utterly taboo. Just days after September 11, 2001, for instance, House Speaker Dennis Hastert agreed to work with House and Senate Democrats on an economic recovery package. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay protested the bipartisan work, but Hastert, in a rare assertion of his authority over the rabid Texan, overruled him. In a Capitol building conference room a few days later, staffers for Dick Gephardt, then House minority leader, and Tom Daschle, his Senate counterpart, were working late into the night with Republican aides on the details of an airline bailout. Sometime around 3:30 a.m., DeLay stormed into the room in a rage--"absolutely red-faced, screaming and yelling," according to a Democratic aide who was present. "Who elected you to Congress?" DeLay yelled at Democratic staffers. To the Republicans he shouted, "We're getting out of here," before marching out with the obedient aides in tow. The next day, DeLay introduced a bill stripped of most of the Democratic provisions.
Then there are the petty slights. If Democrats want to plot strategy, for instance, they can't even count on guaranteed meeting space. This year, GOP leaders kicked them out of a spacious Cannon Office Building room where Democrats had held their weekly caucus meeting for the past several years. Now they convene in a dank basement room in the Capitol Building--except, that is, on days when Republicans announce they'll be using the room themselves. Earlier this year, Democratic leaders sent a letter to Hastert pleading for a designated, permanently reserved meeting room. They never heard back. "That's a very Gingrich type of move," says the leadership aide. "You take the attitude that this is a fight to the death, and you don't give them any breaks. If they can't meet, they can't plan. Why would we help them plan to try to beat us?" When House Democrats held an economic forum earlier this year to spotlight their agenda, the only adequate space they could find was in a Senate office building. "We had one hundred House members taking the subway to the Senate to attend a House function," groans another staffer.
No opportunity is spared to shut out the minority. At the Ways and Means Committee, chaired by the intensely acerbic Bill Thomas, Democrats have been barred from using the committee's hearing room for private meetings. Meanwhile, "the Republicans have rallies in it," notes a Democratic aide. Even the committee's traditional bipartisan holiday party is a thing of the past: Last December, committee Republicans decided to keep the good cheer to themselves; Democrats were not invited.
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