[Marxism] ARTICLE: The Worst Congress Ever -- in five easy steps - Rollingstone.com

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  The Worst Congress Ever


    How our national legislature has become a stable of thieves and
    perverts -- in five easy steps

MATT TAIBBI

/>> See our picks for the 10 Worst Congressmen 
<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12054520> and read what 
people are saying in our politics blog 
<http://www.rollingstone.com/nationalaffairs/?p=620>./

There is very little that sums up the record of the U.S. Congress in the 
Bush years better than a half-mad boy-addict put in charge of a federal 
commission on child exploitation. After all, if a hairy-necked, 
raincoat-clad freak like Rep. Mark Foley can get himself named 
co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, one 
can only wonder: What the hell else is going on in the corridors of 
Capitol Hill these days?

These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and 
incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. 
These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch 
line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula -- 
a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed 
in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American 
empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.

To be sure, Congress has always been a kind of muddy ideological 
cemetery, a place where good ideas go to die in a maelstrom of 
bureaucratic hedging and rank favor-trading. Its whole history is one 
long love letter to sleaze, idiocy and pigheaded, glacial conservatism. 
That Congress exists mainly to misspend our money and snore its way 
through even the direst political crises is something we Americans 
understand instinctively. "There is no native criminal class except 
Congress," Mark Twain said -- a joke that still provokes a laugh of 
recognition a hundred years later.

But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight 
deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing less 
than a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The Republicans who 
control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they have brought their 
revolutionary vision for the House and Senate quite unpleasantly to 
fruition. In the past six years they have castrated the political 
minority, abdicated their oversight responsibilities mandated by the 
Constitution, enacted a conscious policy of massive borrowing and 
unrestrained spending, and installed a host of semipermanent mechanisms 
for transferring legislative power to commercial interests. They aimed 
far lower than any other Congress has ever aimed, and they nailed their 
target.

"The 109th Congress is so bad that it makes you wonder if democracy is a 
failed experiment," says Jonathan Turley, a noted constitutional scholar 
and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington 
Law School. "I think that if the Framers went to Capitol Hill today, it 
would shake their confidence in the system they created. Congress has 
become an exercise of raw power with no principles -- and in that 
environment corruption has flourished. The Republicans in Congress 
decided from the outset that their future would be inextricably tied to 
George Bush and his policies. It has become this sad session of members 
sitting down and drinking Kool-Aid delivered by Karl Rove. Congress 
became a mere extension of the White House."

The end result is a Congress that has hijacked the national treasury, 
frantically ceded power to the executive, and sold off the federal 
government in a private auction. It all happened before our very eyes. 
In case you missed it, here's how they did it -- in five easy steps:

*STEP ONE*
/RULE BY CABAL/

//If you want to get a sense of how Congress has changed under GOP 
control, just cruise the basement hallways of storied congressional 
office buildings like Rayburn, Longworth and Cannon. Here, in the 
minority offices for the various congressional committees, you will 
inevitably find exactly the same character -- a Democratic staffer in 
rumpled khakis staring blankly off into space, nothing but a single 
lonely "Landscapes of Monticello" calendar on his wall, his eyes wide 
and full of astonished, impotent rage, like a rape victim. His skin is 
as white as the belly of a fish; he hasn't seen the sun in seven years. //

// It is no big scoop that the majority party in Congress has always 
found ways of giving the shaft to the minority. But there is a marked 
difference in the size and the length of the shaft the Republicans have 
given the Democrats in the past six years. There has been a systematic 
effort not only to deny the Democrats any kind of power-sharing role in 
creating or refining legislation but to humiliate them publicly, show 
them up, pee in their faces. Washington was once a chummy fraternity in 
which members of both parties golfed together, played in the same pickup 
basketball games, probably even shared the same mistresses. Now it is a 
one-party town -- and congressional business is conducted accordingly, 
as though the half of the country that the Democrats represent simply 
does not exist. //

//American government was not designed for one-party rule but for rule 
by consensus -- so this current batch of Republicans has found a way to 
work around that product design. They have scuttled both the spirit and 
the letter of congressional procedure, turning the lawmaking process 
into a backroom deal, with power concentrated in the hands of a few 
chiefs behind the scenes. This reduces the legislature to a 
Belarus-style rubber stamp, where the opposition is just there for show, 
human pieces of stagecraft -- a fact the Republicans don't even bother 
to conceal. //

// "I remember one incident very clearly -- I think it was 2001," says 
Winslow Wheeler, who served for twenty-two years as a Republican staffer 
in the Senate. "I was working for [New Mexico Republican] Pete Domenici 
at the time. We were in a Budget Committee hearing and the Democrats 
were debating what the final result would be. And my boss gets up and he 
says, 'Why are you saying this? You're not even going to be in the room 
when the decisions are made.' Just said it right out in the open." //

//Wheeler's very career is a symbol of a bipartisan age long passed into 
the history books; he is the last staffer to have served in the offices 
of a Republican and a Democrat at the same time, having once worked for 
both Kansas Republican Nancy Kassebaum and Arkansas Democrat David Pryor 
simultaneously. Today, those Democratic staffers trapped in the basement 
laugh at the idea that such a thing could ever happen again. These days, 
they consider themselves lucky if they manage to hold a single hearing 
on a bill before Rove's well-oiled legislative machine delivers it up 
for Bush's signature. //

//The GOP's "take that, bitch" approach to governing has been taken to 
the greatest heights by the House Judiciary Committee. The committee is 
chaired by the legendary Republican monster James Sensenbrenner Jr., an 
ever-sweating, fat-fingered beast who wields his gavel in a way that 
makes you think he might have used one before in some other arena, 
perhaps to beat prostitutes to death. Last year, Sensenbrenner became 
apoplectic when Democrats who wanted to hold a hearing on the Patriot 
Act invoked a little-known rule that required him to let them have one. //

// "Naturally, he scheduled it for something like 9 a.m. on a Friday 
when Congress wasn't in session, hoping that no one would show," recalls 
a Democratic staffer who attended the hearing. "But we got a pretty good 
turnout anyway." //

//Sensenbrenner kept trying to gavel the hearing to a close, but 
Democrats again pointed to the rules, which said they had a certain 
amount of time to examine their witnesses. When they refused to stop the 
proceedings, the chairman did something unprecedented: He simply picked 
up his gavel and walked out. //

// "He was like a kid at the playground," the staffer says. And just in 
case anyone missed the point, Sensenbrenner shut off the lights and cut 
the microphones on his way out of the room. //

// For similarly petulant moves by a committee chair, one need look no 
further than the Ways and Means Committee, where Rep. Bill Thomas -- a 
pugnacious Californian with an enviable ego who was caught having an 
affair with a pharmaceutical lobbyist -- enjoys a reputation rivaling 
that of the rotund Sensenbrenner. The lowlight of his reign took place 
just before midnight on July 17th, 2003, when Thomas dumped a 
"substitute" pension bill on Democrats -- one that they had never read 
-- and informed them they would be voting on it the next morning. 
Infuriated, Democrats stalled by demanding that the bill be read out 
line by line while they recessed to a side room to confer. But Thomas 
wanted to move forward -- so he called the Capitol police to evict the 
Democrats. //

// Thomas is also notorious for excluding Democrats from the conference 
hearings needed to iron out the differences between House and Senate 
versions of a bill. According to the rules, conferences have to include 
at least one public, open meeting. But in the Bush years, Republicans 
have managed the conference issue with some of the most mind-blowingly 
juvenile behavior seen in any parliament west of the Russian Duma after 
happy hour. GOP chairmen routinely call a meeting, bring the press in 
for a photo op and then promptly shut the proceedings down. "Take a 
picture, wait five minutes, gavel it out -- all for show" is how one 
Democratic staffer described the process. Then, amazingly, the 
Republicans sneak off to hold the real conference, forcing the Democrats 
to turn amateur detective and go searching the Capitol grounds for the 
meeting. "More often than not, we're trying to figure out where the 
conference is," says one House aide. //

// In one legendary incident, Rep. Charles Rangel went searching for a 
secret conference being held by Thomas. When he found the room where 
Republicans closeted themselves, he knocked and knocked on the door, but 
no one answered. A House aide compares the scene to the famous "Land 
Shark" skit from /Saturday Night Live/, with everyone hiding behind the 
door afraid to make a sound. "Rangel was the land shark, I guess," the 
aide jokes. But the real punch line came when Thomas finally opened the 
door. "This meeting," he informed Rangel, "is only open to the coalition 
of the willing." //

//Republican rudeness and bluster make for funny stories, but the 
phenomenon has serious consequences. The collegial atmosphere that once 
prevailed helped Congress form a sense of collective identity that it 
needed to fulfill its constitutional role as a check on the power of the 
other two branches of government. It also enabled Congress to pass 
legislation with a wide mandate, legislation that had been negotiated 
between the leaders of both parties. For this reason Republican and 
Democratic leaders traditionally maintained cordial relationships with 
each other -- the model being the collegiality between House Speaker 
Nicholas Longworth and Minority Leader John Nance Garner in the 1920s. 
The two used to hold daily meetings over drinks and even rode to work 
together. //

// Although cooperation between the two parties has ebbed and flowed 
over the years, historians note that Congress has taken strong 
bipartisan action in virtually every administration. It was Sen. Harry 
Truman who instigated investigations of wartime profiteering under FDR, 
and Republicans Howard Baker and Lowell Weicker Jr. played pivotal roles 
on the Senate Watergate Committee that nearly led to Nixon's impeachment. //

//But those days are gone. "We haven't seen any congressional 
investigations like this during the last six years," says David Mayhew, 
a professor of political science at Yale who has studied Congress for 
four decades. "These days, Congress doesn't seem to be capable of doing 
this sort of thing. Too much nasty partisanship." //

//One of the most depressing examples of one-party rule is the Patriot 
Act. The measure was originally crafted in classic bipartisan fashion in 
the Judiciary Committee, where it passed by a vote of thirty-six to 
zero, with famed liberals like Barney Frank and Jerrold Nadler saying 
aye. But when the bill was sent to the Rules Committee, the Republicans 
simply chucked the approved bill and replaced it with a new, far more 
repressive version, apparently written at the direction of then-Attorney 
General John Ashcroft. //

// "They just rewrote the whole bill," says Rep. James McGovern, a 
minority member of the Rules Committee. "All that committee work was 
just for show." //

//To ensure that Democrats can't alter any of the last-minute changes, 
Republicans have overseen a monstrous increase in the number of "closed" 
rules -- bills that go to the floor for a vote without any possibility 
of amendment. This tactic undercuts the very essence of democracy: In a 
bicameral system, allowing bills to be debated openly is the only way 
that the minority can have a real impact, by offering amendments to 
legislation drafted by the majority. //

//In 1977, when Democrats held a majority in the House, eighty-five 
percent of all bills were open to amendment. But by 1994, the last year 
Democrats ran the House, that number had dropped to thirty percent -- 
and Republicans were seriously pissed. "You know what the closed rule 
means," Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida thundered on the House 
floor. "It means no discussion, no amendments. That is profoundly 
undemocratic." When Republicans took control of the House, they vowed to 
throw off the gag rules imposed by Democrats. On opening day of the 
104th Congress, then-Rules Committee chairman Gerald Solomon announced 
his intention to institute free debate on the floor. "Instead of having 
seventy percent closed rules," he declared, "we are going to have 
seventy percent open and unrestricted rules." //

//How has Solomon fared? Of the 111 rules introduced in the first 
session of this Congress, only twelve were open. Of those, eleven were 
appropriations bills, which are traditionally open. That left just one 
open vote -- H. Res. 255, the Federal Deposit Insurance Reform Act of 
2005. //

// In the second session of this Congress? Not a single open rule, 
outside of appropriation votes. Under the Republicans, amendable bills 
have been a genuine Washington rarity, the upside-down eight-leafed 
clover of legislative politics. //

//When bills do make it to the floor for a vote, the debate generally 
resembles what one House aide calls "preordained Kabuki." Republican 
leaders in the Bush era have mastered a new congressional innovation: 
the one-vote victory. Rather than seeking broad consensus, the 
leadership cooks up some hideously expensive, favor-laden boondoggle and 
then scales it back bit by bit. Once they're in striking range, they 
send the fucker to the floor and beat in the brains of the fence-sitters 
with threats and favors until enough members cave in and pass the damn 
thing. It is, in essence, a legislative microcosm of the electoral 
strategy that Karl Rove has employed to such devastating effect. //

// A classic example was the vote for the Central American Free Trade 
Agreement, the union-smashing, free-trade monstrosity passed in 2005. As 
has often been the case in the past six years, the vote was held late at 
night, away from the prying eyes of the public, who might be horrified 
by what they see. Thanks to such tactics, the 109th is known as the 
"Dracula" Congress: Twenty bills have been brought to a vote between 
midnight and 7 a.m. //

Full at: 
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12055360/cover_story_time_to_go_inside_the_worst_congress_ever