in the house of representatives we have an adorable little treasure called the rules committee, whose job in recent years is to change the rules of the house before each individual bill comes to the floor for debate in order to block popular democratic amendments to bills so they can't be voted on (they kindly allow wildly unpopular democratic amendments). naturally this is done under the guise of expediency, but who needs a guise when nobody knows it exists, including reporters?
today the rules committee announced the new rules for consideration of "the select bipartisan committee to investigate the preparation for and response to hurricane katrina," which could just as easily be called "the select republican committee to blame ray nagin". the bill creates a commission consisting of members of both houses but chaired and heavily weighted towards republicans. the democrats, having recently discovered their long-hibernating sexual organs, introduced a bill last week that establishes a commission modeled word for word after the 9/11 commission. as you recall, it was split evenly between the parties and was staffed by congressional outsiders who - in theory at least - would lack the convenient ability to relieve the federal government (entirely controlled by their shitty party) of all responsibility and blame the local and state governments (controlled by that less-shitty party) for everythig.
the rules committee's bill naturally allows for no amendments whatsoever. but it doesn't even allow for a minority substitute, which is standard practice, common courtesy and established precedent. in short, the republican plan will tie up congressional business in order to save its own ass on taxpayer money. they are scared shitless.
the reason is simple: if they were on record voting against a commission that could actually investigate the truth rather than find clever ways to cloak it, the 2006 elections would be a democratic cakewalk. the arguments these people are coming up with to support this are staggering. right now i'm watching david dreier (r-ca), chair of the rules committee, make his case by pointing out the tragic cases of republican reps and senators who lost homes in the gulf. see? they must care about finding out the truth!
but i guess it would be too much to ask lazy-ass journalists to do some research rather than "reporting" what they read in the blogs last week.
posted by the cold cowboy @ 11:27 AM
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