Archive for the '110th Congress' Category

A little over a week ago, we noted the news that the new Democratic House majority was going to carry over the Republican-initiated term limits on Committee Chairs, a move celebrated here as a way to keep senior Dems on their toes, and give up-and-coming stars a shot at advancing into leadership on an accelerated schedule.

I can't disagree with the idea that the Democratic Caucus has a surplus of junior Members of star quality, and there's no doubt that Speaker Pelosi is on the right track in going out of her way to find (and even create) new vehicles for their brilliance. But to be honest, I was more than a little surprised that the rule survived, given some of the special dynamics in play with this particular set of Democratic Chairmen. As I mentioned in a story back on December 11th, a record number of the top posts are going to Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, some of whom have been around "since the days when it was quite open to question whether chairmanships were a segregated affair." The sudden move to limit the terms of Democratic chairmen, at precisely the time when CBC Members have finally had their patience and faith in "the system" rewarded would, I thought, surely meet with some resistance. I was surprised that it did not.

I should say, I was surprised at first. Later, it just turned out that I was just plain wrong. The Hill is reporting that, in fact, several new Chairmen are protesting the rules holdover, and insist that they were either not consulted at all, or that the Speaker has given assurances that the issue may be revisited. And let me say up front that the doubts expressed in The Hill today are by no means limited to Members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

[T]he morning of the vote [for Speaker], [Rep. David] Obey [(D-Wisc.), the new Appropriations chairman] and Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the dean of the House and the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, voiced their objections to Pelosi.

The Speaker told them that if they can show her they have the votes to overturn the rule, they will get a vote. Yet it is unclear when that will be.

"It will be revisited at some point in time," Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said last week. "When it will be revisited I don’t know."

In fact, quite a few Chairmen are quoted before any Members of the CBC are heard from:

Pelosi surprised Obey and some of the other incoming committee and subcommittee chairmen when she decided to adhere to the Republican rule on panel chairmen.

"I was quite alarmed," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. He added that the chairmen were never informed about the decision to keep that element of the GOP rules package.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said he learned about the policy from a colleague.

Then, later:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) said, "The Speaker said we would come back to it, but it was not with a ringing certainty I would have liked to have heard in her voice."

[...]

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) is confident the votes are there to overturn the existing policy, but Conyers said, "That’s a tall order."

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who will be a chairman of a Ways and Means subcommittee, said, "If you have been around here as long as I have — I’m in my 21st year — you begin to appreciate seniority. We’ll have a meeting of the minds."

Now, this doesn't have to blow up something unseemly, though there will undoubtedly be tensions, both between the players themselves, and the competing theories of governance of the House. We'll have to wait a while to see how this plays out. But in the meantime, it's an interesting lesson for us in Caucus politics, and -- as I'll always want to point out -- of the crucial importance of the control of process and procedure.

[Correction]: After all, aside from the personal drama, what we've just witnessed here is a savvy leader's use of procedure and the rules process to establish a new (for Democrats) regime of governance over the objections of the most powerful committee chairs. How did she do it? Through the Rules committee control of the Democratic Caucus, which sets its own rules about how it will select committee membership and chairs. [A]s we discussed last week, [the Rules committee] is an incredibly powerful tool through which the leadership can exert its influence on substance, by dictating the terms under which that substance will be debated and voted on. Similarly, control of Caucus rules is in the hands of the leadership, so when those rules were handed down for an internal vote it's likely that most if not all Democrats, including the aggrieved chairmen, voted -- either without knowing it, or more likely just without leverage to stop it -- for the very term limits they oppose.

Or, "Why Congressional investigations ought to start with NSA spying."

Let's start with a blast from the past:

SPECTER: Now when you had the first line of review, Mr. Attorney General, by OPR, why wasn't OPR given clearance as so many other lawyers in the Department of Justice were given clearance?

GONZALES: Mr. Chairman, you and I had lunch several weeks ago, and we had a discussion about this. And during this lunch, I did inform you that the terrorist surveillance program is a highly-classified program. It's a very important program for the national security of this country -

SPECTER: Highly-classified, very important, many other lawyers in the Justice Department had clearance. Why not OPR?

GONZALES: And the President of the United States ultimately makes decisions about who ultimately is given access -

SPECTER: Did the President make the decision not to clear OPR?

GONZALES: As with all decisions that are non-operational in terms of who has access to the program, the President of the United States makes the decision because this is such an important program -

The upshot: George W. Bush personally blocked an investigation by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) into the NSA spying program.

But let me remind you, this was not just any investigation. Remember what our friend Murray Waas told us at the time? It was that the investigation wasn't a probe into the legality of the program, but rather:

An internal Justice Department inquiry into whether department officials -- including Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft -- acted properly in approving and overseeing the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program....

It wasn't that Bush blocked an investigation directly into the program's propriety. It was that he blocked an investigation into whether or not the Justice Deparment acted properly in advising him that it was legal.

Not long ago, fellow kossack Major Danby offered a very well-received diary entitled "The Defense in the Impeachment of George W. Bush," "The Defense in the Impeachment of George W. Bush," in which he offered, among many other hurdles, this important caution:

Most importantly, the President was relying on the advice of competent counsel, the leaders of which were approved by Congress, in all of these matters. [...] Even if the President's actions were wrong here, he was acting on legal advice.  To find an impeachable offense here, you have to include that not only was the advice he was given about FISA, the AUMF, and the unitary executive wrong, but that it was so obviously wrong that the President was unreasonable to accept it.

And in general, that's true. Thankfully for the "case," (though tragically, for the country), we're dealing with a specific president, who has taken specific action which might call the applicability of this general principle into serious question.

Consider the nature of the claim Bush would be making here: that his reliance on the advice he got was entirely reasonable under the circumstances.

Then ask this: is his personal intervention to block an investigation into the propriety of the process that yielded that advice the action of a person who thinks relying on that advice was inherently reasonable?

The OPR's blocked investigation into the decision-making process behind the NSA spying program is knowledge we happen to have lucked into. But once it becomes open to question whether the president has been getting his "legal" advice properly and professionally in one key issue area, it becomes an open question in other areas, too. Was the advice the president got on detainee treatment equally flawed? Is the president equally concerned that the process by which that "legal" advice was generated remain secret? If so, why?

The same questions apply to a whole host of issues the 110th Congress intends to investigate, so the sooner we call the president's most likely defense into question, the deeper we'll be able to probe in all areas of inquiry.

I bring this up today because I note the renomination of Steven Bradbury, a Bush recess appointment now serving as Acting Assistant Attorney General, heading the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). Bradbury's first nomination to the post was blocked by Senators Kennedy, Feingold and Durbin, in protest of the blocking of the very investigation I'm talking about. Surely those Senators (and more) will have pertinent questions for Mr. Bradbury on the subject, should they decide to move forward with his nomination.

Like millions of Americans, we rejoiced today in seeing power formally transferred to the new Democratic majority.

I had the rare privilege of watching today from inside the Capitol, where evidence of the change was visible around every corner.

Thanks to the netroots-friendly staff of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, I watched the proceedings with a gang of all your favorites, from the "Blogger's Alley" they thoughtfully arranged for us, and stocked with donuts and coffee, sandwiches, and other costly bribes.

I'm pleased to report we had good traffic all throughout the day, with a number of House Members taking the time to stop in and make the rounds, some familiar with the ways of blogging, some not, but all interested in making and sustaining contact with us as they begin the work of the 110th Congress.

I mostly came for the people-watching aspect of the event. I like to watch C-SPAN to see if I can read any interesting backstory from the way votes are cast, body language of the Members and/or Senators who gather to talk during the votes, etc. So today was great fun from that perspective, since every once in a while, the folks we had all just been watching would wander in to say hi.

The MyDD guys -- in this case Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers -- came loaded for bear, toting a nifty little video recorder with which they've captured some of the flavor of the day, including a high energy greeting from blogosphere fave, Patrick Murphy that was a true pleasure to watch being filmed.

Me, I was most intrigued to watch the ceremonial procedure of the opening of the House. The Clerk presiding before the election and swearing-in of the Speaker. The long... long... long call of the roll. The individual answers of the Members when called to vote.

The thing I watched most closely? The vote of Gene Taylor (D-MS). Gene has in past years been a holdout in voting for the Speaker, refusing to vote for Nancy Pelosi, instead casting a protest vote for Jack Murtha or voting "present."

But today, Gene Taylor was there with his fellow Democrats, voting for Pelosi for speaker.

And his fellow Democrats actually burst into spontaneous applause.

I'm not sure, but it looked to me like he even blushed a little.

It was a good day.

As mcjoan pointed out last night, as the first woman Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi – and the American voting public – has come a long way, fellow babies.

Perhaps it’s time for the press corps to catch up.

From the Washington Post this morning:

Catfight aftermath: Rep. Jane Harman is still quite irked that House Speaker-designee Nancy Pelosi nixed her for chairman of the House intelligence committee – and she's not exactly being stoic about it.

"Catfight?" "Quite irked?" "Not exactly being stoic?"

Arrrgh. This kind of language reduces the serious tactical political differences between the two reps to the level of a couple of women who purchased the same dress slapping each other silly in a back room over who gets to wear it to the swearing-in.

Hmmmm ... remind me again: What was Pelosi’s objection to Harman anyway? Oh, yeah (insert head slap here), it was this:

Pelosi and other liberal Democrats believed that Harman, a moderate, failed to challenge the administration's alleged abuses of intelligence.

The matter of holding the president accountable for his actions is one of the foremost – if not the foremost – issues facing the 110th Congress. To frame the Pelosi/Harman dispute as a "catfight" trivializes both the leaders involved and the underlying importance of Congress’ duty to challenge the president. See, it’s a two-fer: Belittle the players, belittle the issue.

Try this thought experiment: The next time Harry Reid puts the power squeeze on a male colleague, will it be characterized as a "catfight?" Will the squeezed senator be described as "quite irked" or "not exactly being stoic" if he fights back? I’m guessing ... um ... no.

And before everyone goes all "male chauvinist pigs!" on the Washington Post, take a deep breath and click through to the link. The columnist is a woman.

We expected as much from Fox, of course, and Fox delivered. Newshounds has a terrific blow-by-blow analysis of two hours of catty, petty Pelosi coverage, complete with one segment sporting a "Congress Catfight" banner.

Lest anyone worry that our new leadership is all about hissing and scratching in the back alleys over petty scraps of Constitutional import, BarbinMD sent me the following link this morning to reassure us that the press hasn’t completely overlooked the benefits of having a woman in power. Barb wondered if the Nevada newspapers were running similar articles about the new Senate majority leader. Really, people. You must click on the link to get the full ... how shall I say this? ... suitability of this story for this historic present moment.

Then let out a yowl or two.