Whoever conquers a free town and does not demolish it commits a great error and may expect to be ruined himself.
Niccolo Machiavelli
Under the radar of most news outlets is the new set of rules the Democrats just passed on how business will be conducted in the House of Representatives. These rules are typically passed with each new Congress but are mostly procedural and of little consequence outside the halls of that chamber. But Nancy Pelosi’s consolidation of power is underway.
One of the items in the Contract with America that swept many Republicans into office in 1994 and made Newt Gingrich the Speaker of the House, was term limits for committee chairmen. The objective was to get fresh ideas into the policy making rather than creating fiefdoms that would only change when the majority of the House changed hands. The last time Democrats were in power that lasted for forty years.
So, many of the new Democratic congressmen that Rahm Emmanuel skillfully recruited to challenge Republicans, and who were in many cases as conservative or more so than the Republican incumbents, are now shut out of power.
“All those nice pro-life, gun-owning young Democrats recruited to run by Rahm Emanuel will never have any real influence now,” says Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. “They were useful in getting Democrats a majority but now they’ll be in the back of the bus.”
So returning to power are the committee chairmen who ran the committees the last time the Democrats were in power and will remain in power until they die or retire.
Tax cuts will effectively be banned, because the new rules “will mean that the only way to push for a tax cut will be to propose a tax increase elsewhere.” So if you cut taxes over here, but can only do so by raising taxes there, is that a tax cut?
Pelosi has also eliminated a procedural tool called a “Motion to Recommit.” It sounds pretty arcane, but it was introduced a century ago to give the minority some safeguards against the Republican Speaker of the House Joe Cannon. In effect, it allows a vote to send a bill on the floor back to the relevant committee. Barney Frank justified this by saying the minority was “Only interested in game playing.” Nice. Barney Frank is only interested in doing good things for the country, like destroying the financial system by saying that Fannie Mae was fiscally sound before it imploded, but Republicans? They’re only interested in playing games.
It will be an interesting two years to see how much more the Democrats can quash debate and try to ram their programs through.
