May 24, 2007 4:31 PM

Madame Chairwoman, You Are Very Smart - So, Please Stop Playing Dumb

House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-NY) has a post over at MyDD attempting to explain the rule she helped craft today that deliberately paved the way for House Dems to deliver a blank check Iraq War funding bill to President Bush. Louise, responding directly to my post earlier today, says there was nothing devious about what went on and that what happened today with the rule vote was just normal, ho-hum, nothing-to-see-here kind of stuff. I really like Louise a lot, and it's unfortunate that she's trying to play dumb in order to pull something of a fast one in her explanation. The letter to her that I pasted in the comments of her MyDD post is reposted in the extended entry.

Louise:

Thanks for this post, but you are very carefully avoiding what you - as Chairman of the Rules Committee - know quite well is the crux of the issue. Everyone who knows anything about Congress knows that the power of Congress rests in its rules, and in the majority bringing rules to the floor with their own underlying bill.

The rule you passed today had no real underlying bill. Instead, it allowed two votes - one on much-needed domestic priorities (which I have no problem with) and one on a Republican plan to give President Bush a blank check. Not only did you not start the debate with an underlying Democratic bill that includes any kind of binding timelines, you didn't even allow a vote on an alternative to the Republican bill.

What you did, in other words, was behave exactly as David Dreier would have behaved had he still been House Rules Chairman and wanted to give President Bush a blank check. Having worked in the House for five years, this is what the GOP did. They passed rules allowing only up-or-down votes on Republican legislation, with no votes allowed on Democratic alternatives.

What you could have done - had you honestly wanted to end the war - was brought legislation that included timelines to the floor. If you felt generous, you may have coupled that legislation with a rule allowing the Republicans a chance to offer an amendment to strip out the antiwar language (but I stress that you didn't have to do that either, as Republicans showed during their decade-long control of the House). If you had proceeded this way, the debate would have started on Democrats' turf. If you really wanted to pass binding timelines you may have proceeded just as you did on the original supplemental which was vetoed, and perhaps you may even have attached the minimum wage to it directly, so as to make it that much harder for Republicans to vote again. Let me say again - THIS IS PRECISELY WHAT YOU DID WHEN YOU PASSED THE ORIGINAL BILL WITH TIMELINES SO WE ALL KNOW YOU KNEW WHAT YOU WERE DOING DIFFERENTLY TODAY.

But as I said, that's not what you did. You passed a rule allowing the House to consider only the Republican blank check. That is beyond a travesty. For a majority party to use its rules power to give the minority party an up-or-down vote on a bill that runs counter to the election mandate that brought the majority to power - and to allow that up-or-down vote to occur without even the possibility of an alternative - is, in a word, unprecedented.

- David Sirota

This is why I said at the beginning of the day that the entire creation of this twisted rule was a deliberate effort to confuse the public in a devious and secretive way that only Dick Cheney could love. When non-political folks look at what happened today, they will see Democrats approved a procedural rule, and voted against a Republican bill to give President Bush a blank check for the Iraq War. What they may not see is the real story: The procedural vote was the vote to create a situation that Democrats knew would result in the passage of a blank check. In other words, the procedural vote was the key vote in support of the blank check, because it set up a situation whereby passage of the blank check was inevitable. If that rule vote didn't pass, the blank check wouldn't even be able to come to the floor in the inevitably-going-to-pass situation it ended up coming up in.

As an aside, for those wondering why Republicans voted against the rule, see my earlier post. I explain some of the rationale there.