House of Representatives passes tough new ethics package. I think the quantity of good legislation that Nancy Pelosi's been able to move through the House of Representatives has tended to go underappreciated by liberals. "The new congress" elected in 2006 has in many ways been a disappointment, but those disappointments have overwhelmingly taken place in the Senate where the rules and the numbers simply aren't on the side of progressive change.
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Reform on the March
12 Mar 2008 09:40 am
Comments (12)
I think the quantity of good legislation that Nancy Pelosi's been able to move through the House of Representatives has tended to go underappreciated by liberals.
Can you give us a list of examples? Because when I consider the House since 2006, I mostly think of its high-profile failures to stand up to the White House on the Iraq war, on torture, and on domestic spying.
Sadly it is the Senate that has proved to be the undoing of things after the 2006 elections. Though I like to console the progressive with this imagery: imagine what things would be like if the Democrats hadn't won and the Republicans were still running the show? Well, I can assume that the rubber stamp congress would have given Bush free reign to trample on the Constitution however he wants.
I wish the Democrats would have fought a Republican filibuster tooth and nail.
Ethics laws are only as good as the enforcement mechanisms set up to implement and police them. If you're allowed to repeatedly run a red light what good does it do to erect it? House Reps know the cops lurking in the bushes are too busy drinking coffee and jerking off to write any tickets.
I agree. The House has and has continued to pass good legislation since Jan. 2007, but it has been stopped either by the Senate GOP or Bush. Hopefully, a Democratic President and more seats in the Senate will lead to great, progressive legislation being enacted.
The House has done a better job than the Senate, which I think has been at least reflected in the DKos job approval straw polls, but really, who couldn't do a better job than Harry Reid's Senate? In much the same way, the Jets finished ahead of the Dolphins last year, but it's not because the 2007 Jets were a good team.
The Senate has been a disappointment. When the shoe was on the other foot in 2005 and the GOP was in the majority, though, they went to the mat on judicial appointments, essentially threatening the "nuclear option" of thwarting the filibuster rule if they didn't get what they wanted. Which they did after the "Gang of 14" bipartisan fold. Why can't we do that? Answer: Our Senators don't have the stones to do it.
but those disappointments have overwhelmingly taken place in the Senate where the rules and the numbers and Harry Reid simply aren't on the side of progressive change.
Mike:
Very true, but I wonder whether MY would be rash enough to (gasp!) actually name names and call Reid a hack. I rate the willingness of MY, Ezra Klein, and other progressive bloggers to tangle with their Establishment elders as quite low. Come on, Matt, speak truth to power, dude! You have nothing to lose but your.....um, Atlantic gig....Oops, never mind! Carry on!
Nancy Pelosi has pushed through a few good things. She has also managed to allow several really bad things to happen, Marshall and James Gary cover them pretty well in the first two comments. Let me add that the failure to impeach an admitted law breaker like Bush was inexcusable. I believe her peremptory declaration not to do so was because she had prior knowledge of the lawless wiretapping as a member of the gang of eight and would be tarred with the same brush. Disgusting.
While it's true that in the Senate, "the rules and the numbers simply aren't on the side of progressive change," it's not like the Dems even tried to use the rules to their best advantage.
The Dems should have forced the GOP to back up its free, easy procedural filibusters with time-consuming, pain-in-the-neck actual talkfest filibusters.
Starting with the minimum-wage hike last January. If the GOP had been forced to talk all day and all night to deprive near-poor Americans of that modest pay hike, I doubt they would have done it.
At any rate, the GOP would have either backed down, or earned most Americans' undying loathing.
But the Dems weren't willing to force the issue, even when it was a win-win situation for them.
The funniest part about this is that, in passing the new "ethics" law, the Democrats broke their own House Rule. In fact, the rule they broke was the rule preventing the majority from holding a vote open longer than 15 minutes in order to twist some arms to come up with the votes to pass a measure - the very rule that supposedly fixed that terrible problem when the Republicans held the vote open on the prescription drug bill to get the necessary votes. Remember how much the lefty blogosphere went nuts complaining about that? Now the Democrats have done the very same thing - in contravention of the rule that they themselves implemented.
Ethics indeed!
Comments closed March 26, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
That is not really true. Independent of the Senate, Pelosi could have spearheaded a refusal to fund the war after Bush's veto last March/April. That was the end of this Congress.
Posted by Marshall | March 12, 2008 9:46 AM