Dems warn leaders to resume regular order
By Jared Allen
Posted: 02/02/09 07:11 PM [ET]
A group of more than 50 House Democrats has penned a letter to Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) imploring him to restore this institution and see that the House returns to a regular order process of legislating.
The letter, signed by a large number of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition and the centrist New Democratic Coalition, has not yet been sent. Members are still gathering signatures in an effort to send the strongest signal possible to all top House Democrats that
the caucus is up in arms over the top-down method of legislating employed by Democrats since late last year.
Hoyer, and not Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was chosen as the recipient not because he is viewed as the prime enemy, but because this group has no better friend in this fight than the majority leader who is widely respected across the ideological spectrum for his adherence to rules and procedures an aide said.
You and Speaker Pelosi have each been quoted repeatedly as noting that the country must be governed from the middle, employing bipartisanship to solve our problems; we proudly and strongly affirm that view, the members wrote. One of the most basic but vital tools we have at our disposal to encourage bipartisanship is regular order in the House and Senate.
Since last year, many senior House Democrats many of them subcommittee chairmen have grown overly frustrated with how only small and select bands of legislators have been responsible for writing bills, such as the $700 billion Wall Street bailout as well as much of the $819 billion economic stimulus bill.
Democratic leaders have acknowledged that the regular order process of methodically developing and writing bills in subcommittees and committees has been abandoned recently. But they have defended the handling of such sensitive and important legislation by only an exclusive group of leadership and senior lawmakers as a necessary tactic during exceptional times.
They have also said that, despite the truncated process, Pelosi has made extraordinary efforts to solicit and include ideas from the caucus a view many rank-and-file Democrats shared.
Democratic leaders also have promised both to their members in private and in public to return to regular order as soon as the emergency economic stimulus bill was completed.
Now at least 50 Democrats are calling the Speakers hand.
Committees must function thoroughly and inclusively, and cooperation must ensue between the parties and the houses to ensure that our legislative tactics enable rather than impede progress, the members wrote. In general, we must engender an atmosphere that allows partisan games to cease and collaboration to succeed.
Along with their demands, Democrats also included a stark warning to their leaders: change or become the Republicans you spent your years in the minority vilifying.
Under one-party Republican rule, this noble institution, to which we are all democratically elected, deteriorated, they wrote. We lost sight of our shared values and common goals, because in many cases, the Congress wasnt operating as it should. Without regular order governing our daily function, Members often had little opportunity to work together in a bipartisan basis, to find our common purpose.
Without thorough hearings on important issues, opportunities to amend and improve bills, or the ability to conference legislation, Republicans isolated the power of 435 diverse voices into the hands of a very few, the letter continues. We believe that improper governance disserved the institution of Congress and ultimately disserved the American people.
Republicans chastised Pelosi for shutting them out of the bill-writing process in justifying their unanimous votes against the House stimulus bill last week.
Pelosi defended her handling of the bill which she broke up in three parts and sent to three different committees, where it was subject to full markups as appropriate and inclusive.
We reached out to the Republicans all along the way, and they know it, she told reporters last week. They just didnt have the ideas that had the support of the majority of the people in the Congress.
At the same time, many of the 11 Democrats who voted against the stimulus bill including Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), who has signed the letter said they also objected to the process.
And others, including Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), said their frustration over how the bill was hastily put together almost led them to vote against it, as well.
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/democrats-warn-leaders-to-resume-regular-order-2009-02-02.html
Two minutes later he was snoozing.
Maybe too much anaesthesia from all that "work".
