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Broken Promises: The Death of Deliberative Democracy A Congressional Report on the Unprecedented Erosion of the Democratic Process in the 108th Congress. Compiled by the House Rules Committee Minority Office The Honorable Louise M. Slaughter, Ranking Member EXECUTIVE SUMMARY In the 108th Congress, House Republicans became the most arrogant, unethical and corrupt majority in modern Congressional history. When they took control of the House after the 1994 elections, Republicans vowed they would be different than previous Congresses. They promised they would manage the House in a way that fostered what they called “deliberative democracy,” which they defined as “the full and free airing of conflicting opinions through hearings, debates, and amendments for the purpose of developing and improving legislation deserving of the respect and support of the people.” This report documents how, ten years after their “revolution,” House Republicans have completely abandoned this standard of deliberative democracy they set for themselves. Furthermore, they have abandoned any other principle of procedural fairness or democratic accountability. In the opinion of many non-partisan observers of Congress, the 108th Congress not only matched the worst abuses of earlier Congresses; it set a whole new benchmark. This report examines in detail how, over the past two years, the Republican leadership ignored the House Rules and the basic standards of legislative fairness and regular order with an impunity that is unprecedented in the history of the House of Representatives. This report shows that:
INTRODUCTION – THE “IMPERIAL CONGRESS”
The 108th Congress was not the first in the history of the House in which the majority leadership abused the House rules to block meaningful deliberation on legislation with far-reaching effects on the lives of millions of Americans. Nor was it the first to hold open a vote beyond the customary time limit in order to twist enough arms to turn a losing margin into a victory. And, to be fair, the Republican leadership of the 108th Congress was not the first to manipulate House rules to exclude the minority from the legislative process or to jam through bills that probably wouldn’t have enjoyed majority support in the House if Members had been able to read them. No, what sets the 108th Congress apart from its predecessors is that stifling deliberation and quashing dissent in the House of Representatives became the standard operating procedure. Heavy-handed maneuvers that a few years ago would have inspired outrage among fair-minded Democratic or Republican Members, became commonplace. Past Congresses waived the House Rules; the 108th Congress simply ignored them. And when their tactics led them into conflict with House Rules they could not ignore, they changed them. In an editorial criticizing the way the majority handled the Energy Bill conference report in late 2003, the Washington Post commented: “An occasional illness has become a chronic disease. Tactics once considered egregious have become ordinary.” An in-depth investigation by the Boston Globe into House procedures in the 108th Congress reported that “longtime Congress-watchers say they have never seen the legislative process so closed to input from minority-party Members, the public, and lobbyists whose agenda is unsympathetic to GOP leadership goals.” Week after week in the 108th Congress, we watched as the Rules Committee and the Republican leadership lowered the standard of what passes for a “fair process” in the U.S. House of Representatives. We watched as non-controversial suspension bills, rather than debate on major legislation, occupied more and more of our already abbreviated weekly schedule. We watched as the Rules Committee routinely ignored regular committee order, opting instead for doing business under “emergency” procedures in the wee hours of the night or early in the morning. We watched as the Rules Committee excluded larger and larger numbers of House Members with amendments from floor debates. We watched as Republican leaders shut down the conference process so completely that the only people who knew the contents of conference reports when they came to the House floor were the special interest lobbyists who had written them. Outside experts appear to share our assessment. When asked to compare the heavy-handed control of the majority in the 108th Congress to past Congresses, Brookings Institution congressional scholar Thomas Mann, commented: “It’s worse…It’s been carried to a new extreme.” In July, 2003, Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute commented: “If Democrats, when they were in the House majority, jammed through plenty of bills without Republican participation and turned off moderate Members of the minority, their highhandedness was nothing compared to what House Republicans are doing now.” A year further into the 108th Congress, Ornstein’s critique of the Republicans’ management of the House had grown even harsher. He wrote: “It is the middle-finger approach to when I was in the minority.” In short, the current Republican leadership has become the arrogant and corrupt majority they despised and condemned in their minority days. In the 108th Congress, Republicans abandoned any of the moral high ground they still claimed to have from their campaign to reform the way Congress did business in the early 1990s. As our former colleague Joe Scarborough wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal: “Ten years ago, Republican congressional candidates like me were running as Washington outsiders promising to balance the budget and pay off the federal debt. We campaigned against the Imperial Congress and promised Americans that if we got elected, we would be different. We lied.”The Members who once, with some justification, railed against a majority leadership’s abuses of power are now the masters of their own Imperial Congress. As Roll Call noted in an editorial last year, “Eight years after the takeover, Republicans are blocking Democratic amendments with as much authoritarian disdain as Democrats ever demonstrated - or more. And the autocrats in charge are the former complaining victims...” To his credit, Chairman Dreier finally admitted during this Congress that he was using many of the tactics he condemned when he was in the minority. He told USA Today: "We have had to do some of the things we criticized once… But now that I'm in the majority, I have this responsibility to govern. It's something I didn't completely understand when I was in the minority.” While Chairman Dreier certainly has the right to change his mind on the question of what constitutes a “fair process” in the House, we will continue to point to comments he made when his perspective was that of a minority Rules Committee Member. For example, in 1993, Chairman Dreier and his Republican Rules Committee colleagues issued a report condemning a number of tactics they argued the majority was using to shut down “deliberative democracy,” which they defined as: “the full and free airing of conflicting opinions through hearings, debates, and amendments for the purpose of developing and improving legislation deserving of the respect and support of the people.” In quite eloquent words, Chairman Dreier and his colleagues made the following statement: “When Members are elected to Congress with the expectation that they will be exercising their rights as lawmakers on behalf of their constituents, only to be told they may not fully exercise those rights on the House floor, something has gone radically haywire with the constitutional scheme of things. While the majority party always has the right to establish the rules and legislative agenda for the House, it should recognize the need to place responsible limits on those powers which permit all Members to fully participate in the truly deliberative process and of all the people to be fully represented in their national legislature.”While Chairman Dreier no longer seems interested in holding himself accountable to the definition of a fair process he and his colleagues set for themselves a decade ago, we think it is a good one and we will continue to draw attention to their actions that fall below their standard. A review of House proceedings over the past two years leads us to the unavoidable conclusion that, if the benchmark is “deliberative democracy” as Chairman Dreier and House Republicans defined it in the underlined quote above, the 108th Congress was a miserable failure. This report will discuss in more detail the ways the Republican leadership and the Rules Committee majority systematically denied House Members and the American people the “full and free airing” of ideas they deserve. It will also make some modest recommendations to curtail the most egregious abuses we observed in the 108th Congress and restore a small measure of accountability and democratic deliberation to a legislative body that is supposed to be a model of those two values.
I. House Republicans Used Restrictive and Closed Rules to Make the
House Floor a Democracy-Free Zone
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