JOHN FUND SAYS THAT CONGRESS NEEDS AN INTERVENTION:
The House of Representatives almost turned into the Fight Club Thursday night, when Democrats ruled that a GOP motion had failed even though, when the gavel fell, the electronic score board showed it winning 215-213 along with the word FINAL. The presiding officer, Rep. Mike McNulty (D., N.Y.), actually spoke over the clerk who was trying to announce the result.
In the ensuing confusion several members changed their votes and the GOP measure to deny illegal aliens benefits such as food stamps then trailed 212-216. Boiling-mad Republicans stormed off the floor. The next day, their fury increased when they learned electronic records of the vote had disappeared from the House’s voting system.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi made matters worse when she told reporters, “There was no mistake made last night.” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer had to rescue her by acknowledging that, while he thought no wrongdoing had occurred, the minority party was “understandably angry.” Under pressure, the House unanimously agreed to create a select committee, with subpoena powers, to investigate Republican charges the vote had been “stolen.”
Congress appears to be gripped by a partisanship that borders on tribal warfare. In a forthcoming book, Los Angeles Times columnist Ron Brownstein compares it to a “second Civil War” that has led to “the virtual collapse of meaningful collaboration” between the two parties.
Read the whole thing. Yes, I thought things couldn’t get worse, but I was wrong. And note this passage:
Mr. Foley also made a very prescient warning. He urged his fellow Democrats not to exact retribution or respond in kind to heavy-handed GOP tactics should they win back control that November, as they ended up doing: “Democrats [should] clearly and intensely [promise] that if they take the majority back again, they will not go back and try to pay back, so to speak, what they felt were the excesses and even the outrages of this period, but will promise minority rights in reaching those minority decisions.”
Clearly, his fellow Democrats in the House haven’t been following his advice. Maybe they ought to appoint Messrs. Foley and Gingrich to head an outside task force to recommend ways to make the House work again. If the House had the sense to recognize it had to appoint a select committee to investigate last Friday’s vote fiasco, it should see the possible benefits of having an outside group weigh in on its dysfunctional ways.
Foley’s advice is made more poignant because it was his action in holding the vote open past the deadline to manage passage of the assault weapons ban that cost him his seat in Congress, and the Democrats their majority last time around.
UPDATE: Reader Rick Lang emails: “And the US Congress has the audacity to say the war is lost because the IRAQI Parliament is non-functional. . . .”