Bipartisanship? Tee Hee!

So will a new Democratic majority ring in an era of bipartisanship and “uniters, not dividers”? Will Nancy Pelosi & Co. eschew the sneaky rulesmanship and debate-stifling tactics they spent 12 years complaining about?

If you said yes, you lose.

As they prepare to take control of Congress this week and face up to campaign pledges to restore bipartisanship and openness, Democrats are planning to largely sideline Republicans from the first burst of lawmaking.

House Democrats intend to pass a raft of popular measures as part of their well-publicized plan for the first 100 hours. They include tightening ethics rules for lawmakers, raising the minimum wage, allowing more research on stem cells and cutting interest rates on student loans.

But instead of allowing Republicans to fully participate in deliberations, as promised after the Democratic victory in the Nov. 7 midterm elections, Democrats now say they will use House rules to prevent the opposition from offering alternative measures, assuring speedy passage of the bills and allowing their party to trumpet early victories.

No free debate. No alternatives allowed. No open questioning of the majority’s plan lest the questioner be silenced.

Could it be that if the Republicans were doing this, we might hear the word “fascism” bandied about? Could be that the trembling legs of the leftists look pretty good in – ahem – jackboots?

Of course, it’s not nearly that bad, just like it wasn’t that bad when the wilting lilies of the left were shrieking about Karl Rove’s brownshirts and how we were all right on the verge of NeoTheoFascism that would turn America into AmeriKKKa.

The truth is, ramming home a bunch of faux reforms is a good way to look clean and pretty, especially when your members are among the biggest crooks in town. It is a time-honored tradition that Pelosi and Gang are all too willing to continue mostly because it still works. How do I know it works? Well, do you see any stories today about a Congressman who admitted to breaking a couple Federal laws? Of course, not, because that news was kind of slicked out there on Friday past, the least-productive day of the least-productive week of the year.

Nevertheless, it’s a good story. John Conyers dropped a quick press release, as did the Ethics Committee, essentially saying the Congressman violated Federal Law and received no punishment. When last we saw him, he was busy writing a book about the supposed crimes of the Bush adminstration. What we didn’t know is that he was committing actual crimes of his own. One has to wonder how many staff aides he conscripted to work on the book or if the staff counsel running her own law practice out of the office charged him any billable hours to advise him on whether the President was impeachable for his “crimes”. I suppose that’s a question we will never have answered because the Ethics Committee and his party’s leadership has pretty much washed its hands of the situation.

We might hope that will change. After all, it is something that Pelosi promised us. But I wouldn’t hold my breath since Conyers is going to be the new chairman of the Judicial Committee. It seems odd that you’d put an admitted lawbreaker in charge of a committee that oversees things like laws and judges and such but obviously I don’t have the wisdom of a Speaker of the House.

Still, the First Hundred Hours ought to be fun to watch, of for no other reason than to watch the Democrats do the very things they wept big fat crocodile tears about in every year since 1994.

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Category: Our New Democratic Overlords