Last August, I wrote this:
When I lived in Canada, I used to describe the Canadian government as an elected dictatorship. This is because Canada is a parliamentary democracy in which the standing rules of Parliament gave the Prime Minister an extraordinary amount of power to coerce and punish MPs (Members of Parliament) who don’t cooperate (I don’t believe that’s changed, but I can’t say for certain). As a consequence, the people of Canada elected the parliament every so often, thus determining who would be the PM, and the PM then pretty much ruled as dictator until the next election. To me, it seemed like rather a travesty of democracy (though to the Natural Governing Party, aka the Canadian Liberal Party, it seemed like a pretty good deal, at least during their long stretch in power).It appears, however, that Nancy Pelosi doesn’t share my opinion; judging by her behavior today, in which she attempted to use all the powers of her office to shut up a GOP challenge to her preferred policies, it seems she would like the same ability to dominate, manipulate, and otherwise control the House of Representatives that Jean Chrétien once wielded in the Parliament of Canada. Fortunately for us—and I do mean for all of us; if her tactics work, they might be good for the Democratic Party in the short run, but they’ll be bad for the nation in the medium and long run—some of the House GOP have been displaying unaccustomed backbone in the face of her political thuggery, refusing to go home like whipped curs with their tails between their legs. I particularly appreciated this line from Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter: “This is the people’s House. This is not Pelosi’s politiburo.” Amen to that.
Now, Speaker Pelosi—and Harry Reid, her Senate counterpart—are taking parliamentary dictatorship to the next level. Indeed, they’ve pushed it so far that even the Washington Post is expressing disapproval. As the D.C. Examiner put it,
We know Democratic lawmakers have taken their bully-boy tactics too far when even The Washington Post worries about the lack of civility in the 111th Congress. As the Post notes, during the 110th Congress “Democrats brought more measures to the House floor under closed rules—permitting no amendments—than any of the six previous Republican-controlled congresses.” Barring amendments to proposed legislation, of course, means take it or leave it, which renders floor debate all but meaningless. . . .Considering how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are treating Republicans in the new Congress, the brazen muzzling of minority rights will continue. Take the pork-laden $10 billion public lands bill Reid ram-rodded over the weekend. It combined more than 160 discrete bills in one omnibus monstrosity, with no amendments permitted. In fact, it’s been six months since Reid permitted Senate GOPers to offer amendments to any Democratic proposal in the Senate. By stifling GOP amendments, Reid is robbing millions of Americans of their right to be heard in the Senate. As Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, says: “Offering amendments is a right and responsibility of senators, not a special privilege or scheduling inconvenience.”On the House side, in addition to severely limiting the GOP’s right to propose amendments from the floor, Pelosi has even gone after the hallowed minority prerogative of offering a motion to recommit a bill before a final vote on passage. Recommiting a bill sends it back to committee, which usually kills it. During their dozens years as a majority, House Republicans only rarely limited Democrats’ ability to offer recommit motions. Unless Pelosi relents, House Republicans and dissident Democrats will be all but shut out of the legislative process in 2009.
I suspect that “dissident Democrats” are the real target here, and that the chief “dissident” they have in their sights is Barack Obama. It’s pretty clear that Speaker Pelosi et al. want to govern from the hard left, and so far, with his appointments, statements, and actions, the president-elect has been sending strong signals that aside from abortion, he has no intention of cooperating with that agenda; it looks to me like Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid are marshaling their forces to try to force him to do so. In order to set the agenda, they have to be sure that if they need to override a veto, they can whip the necessary votes into line; these sorts of measures, combined with the signals they’ve sent that they’re willing to remove committee chairs from their positions for reasons other than death or gross malfeasance, give them at least some ability to do so, and prepare the ground for any further moves they might need to make toward that end.