It really is a corporate mentality and they are working overtime to prevent a hostile take-over by the American people. In a way it is a perfect clash between democracy and capitalism. I am certain that the history books will study this period diligently someday. We will learn a lot from this episode and perhaps we will be better for it. (if we survive it, that is)

…legions of Bushbots repeating that who think they are in on the con, but who are never going to amount to anything. Pathetic, except that it is (they are) so dangerous.

They don’t think they’re in on the con. The reverse is true — they know they’re being conned. They don’t care.

The salient fact in American politics, which we forget at our peril, is that there are between forty and seventy million Americans who will volunteer to live in a cardboard box under a bridge and toast sparrows on an old curtain rod so long as they are sure that the fag, or the foreigner, or the Muslim, or the liberal, or the whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even get the sparrows.

That dovetails nicely with the drive by those at the top to get their hands on everything. And that’s coalition enough to elect a president.

EW – Oh, I saw that, but that mention doesn’t really rise to the level of what I am talking about. I guess I should be happy that they even mentioned it in light of the black eye the matter is for Congress. But, go figure, that is not enough in my eyes.

â€I’m tired of people who want the money and the power, but not the responsibility, that comes with the job.â€

Well that’s really it, isn’t it, PJ? Even when the Dems were in the minority, they should have hired volunteers (law students, say) to read bills through looking for trojan horses like that one.

Apropos of my initial comment, I’m getting increasingly concerned that we won;t be rid of theswe people in Jan 2009 if we don’t take some serious steps by the end of the year to curb Bush’s power.

And erven if we do bid them adieu, we will have all the Hinderakers and soldiers in PTSD and assorted others undermining the Dems from the day after the election, if not before.

We are really going to reap some bad karma for not doing more to stop Bush, IMHO.

Unless Florida is flooded and the southeast is on fire and anger turns to the GOP for having denied global warming or something. Of course, they’ll blame that on the immigrants too.

bmaz — I may be wrong, but my impression is that the number of pages each member of Congress would have to read is pretty enormous. Plus, IIRC in the last Congress (and in all likelihood, those preceding it) they were endlessly voting on bills the day after (sometimes hours after) getting the final version of the bill. Such a system makes it really easy to slip something nefarious into a bill. In fact, I believe the Rethugs rushed things on purpose, so Dems could never get a good look at anything until it was too late.

I don’t expect each member to read every last page, that is why they have a staff. However, even a diligent staff can’t get through long and complicated documents in a few hours. I think this needs to be remedied, some sort of waiting period (based on the number of pages, so the longer the document, the longer the waiting period) to ensure every member’s staff has time for a proper review.

And then, if I was a member of Congress and I discovered that a member of my staff was a White House mole, I would fire their ass. I wonder, did Spectre ever fire the guy responsible for that PATRIOT Act provision?

Phred I agree with that completely. That is one reason I included the fraud part of the discussion. There was a conscious and dedicated effort to do it surreptitiously, and that fits clearly within a classic fraud discussion.

AG AG’s choice for the USA in Utah was Kyle Sampson.

bmaz — I hope LHP sees your comments so she can add fraud to her articles of impeachment. Thanks!

somethingsrotten — Your moniker is particularly well suited for that comment Thanks for the answer. Do you happen to know if Specter fired him first or was he still being a good little mole right up until he got nod to be a USA?

somethingsrotten — You mean even AFTER pulling a stunt like that Spectre supported him as a USA?!?! Did Specter not know at that time what Tolman had done, or was this Spectre’s way of telling the world that slipping that provision in was just ducky with him?

cboldt – Again, as seems to be frequently the case, I completely agree with both of those comments. But they are part and parcel, if they read it and don’t understand it, or even realize they are not lawyers etc. and that they might ought to get some advice to make SURE they understand it; it is their incumbent duty to do just that. The way this crap continuously transpires is patently unconscionable.

Oops. Been telling you folks for months I have crappy eyesight and need to break down and get glasses or lasik or something. Sorry about that.

bmaz

I understand about the amount of reading they’d have to do.

I live in CA – we get these humongous propositions on the ballot. I’ve found some kickers in them (there was one I recall that was supposed to restrict smoking … and there was a ban on nuclear power plants buried inside it, that, funny thing about it, no one ever mentioned). I try to read the analyst’s report and the props themselves, but not the arguments (which are usually cr*p, except for the names attached).
[I also wish that, with some of them, someone had taken the instigator aside and asked them what they really intended it to do, and to think about cheaper and simpler ways to reach that goal. The one on mistreatment of horses comes immediately to mind: if you want them to be treated humanely on the way to becoming pet food, the easy way is to have horsemeat declared fit for human consumption, which would require that they get breaks for food, etc, the same as sheep and cattle. But no, they had to go for doing it the complicated way ….]

Things like the Tolman language usually get slipped into the final version of a Bill during meetings of House/Senate Conference Committees, when they must reconcile quite different versions of Bills already passed by each house. On such bills, when they return to the floor, no amendments are possible, and they are only subject to an up or down vote.

What happens is that the Conference Committee principles resolve the big differences, and then they go home, leaving staff to complete the technical language. If, as in this case, you probably had staffers from both houses carrying the WH water, the process of â€slipping in†is just a matter of quickly agreeing to add language, and the other side approving, and viewing the effort as a technical correction.

There have over the years been many efforts to fix this — for instance requiring a period of 48 hours between publication of the final language and either house’s vote — meaning at least some members of the public in DC could read through legislation. More recently, the demand has been to put it on the net 48 hours before a vote. If I remember they did revise rules on this at the beginning of this session, but they also allowed for circumstances when they could eliminate the 48 hours for public reading of the final product.

Conference Committees, and the preperation of a Final Conference Report have always been a place where Mischief is easily accomplished, (frequently in the dead of night when all but the green eyeshade boys have gone home to bed) and there are many interests who want to keep it this way. It is where all the earmarks get very precisely worded, where language that narrows a broad public purpose gets inserted.

To change it — publication and the 48 hour reading period would help, but holding the Chairs in both houses who co-chair Conference Committees personally responsible would also help. In this instance, if I remember rightly, putting Tolman on his staff was part of the price Specter paid for actually getting his Chairmanship of Judiciary. (Remember the Religious Right threw a fit because Arlen is pro-choice, and they wanted the Republican Conference to take him out of contention for the Chairmanship.) His price for actually getting his Chairmanship in 2003 was to accept Tolman as his minder. The matter of slipping in the total elimination of Senate Advice and Consent privilege vis a vis replacement USA’s was probably only one consequence of that little power play. There may be many others — we and the MSM just haven’t really looked at the details of how various Conference Reports were finalized.

Woom should read â€roomâ€. Man, I get worse every day.

Dang it, it’s catching bmaz, that should have been â€what isâ€. Sheesh…

48 hours on the Internet would be a Capital Improvement, believe me. There is actually no way to dispassionately teach the political science of Conference Reports when leadership has declared a drive toward â€end of session†except to suggest you get involved with some poor little non-profit that does good work, but needs something either from Congress or the State Legislatures, and go be a volunteer lobbyist, and get an education. It is a casino.

I first got exposed to the process back in the 1960’s when the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights gave me Congressional Credentials, and sent me with a very experience player of the game, to work the Civil Rights bill in 64, and then some of the Great Society programs. I then developed a speciality in the Minnesota State Legislature, and eventually I taught students to do it — right now one of my former students is President of the State Senate, and a master player in the game. So what I recommend if you want to learn is pick a very deserving cause that has no money to hire a professional lobbyist, volunteer, and learn it too. (That is actually how I taught my students.)

You have to understand that a Conference Report can emerge that bears very little relationship to the bills actually passed by either house. In most cases this is not so, as committee members who nursed along a bill through the process are very sensitive to having something left on the floor in Conference. If so, they will stay till the bitter end to watch over their product, which frequently is the result of hard negotiation in committee and on the individual house floors. But quite honestly, since 2003 when both house were Republican, they didn’t even appoint Democratic Conferees — the Leadership (Hastert and Frist) decided on what would be in and out, and the Conferences were mostly sham, bringing forward essentially what the WH wanted. The price of getting a special bit of language or an earmark into a bill, was to go along with the sham. That kept the Republicans united, and the Dem’s could not do a damn thing about it, except some screaming when the Conference Report appeared on the floor for an up or down vote.

So — understanding the system, then you take that and let folk know how Mischief can be done. Part of that is having access to bills that go into conference, and the report that comes out — and since they can be heavy duty legal language, and less than a thousand pages is not unusual, you have to have people who know what they are reading organized and available to find the rotten stuff before the final floor votes. I know, 48 hours isn’t long, but it is a huge improvement on perhaps an hour or so, and bills that are not yet printed, but just a jumble of stuff hot off the copier. The whole point of creating a jam up of must pass bills at the end of a session is precisely so the little â€slip in†game can be played. On one occassion during the final mark up of the 64 Civil Rights Bill, some of the conferees and staff came in with a whole mass of changes at about 2AM that changed â€Shall†to â€May†— difference in Affirmative Action Law and the EEOC structure between You Must — or at your pleasure. Some of us had to get old Hubert out of bed to come to the conference room and give a speech and read the riot act. He was, afterall, the historic floor leader on that thing, and the last thing he would have wanted in his bio is that he lost because he went home and was enjoying a good night’s sleep. The Shall’s stayed in the final language.

If it were up to me to design a remedy given current resources — I would put a fair minded live blogger inside every Conference meeting, directly connected to anyone with net access who was a stakeholder in the process. You doing the Patriot Act tonight between Midnight and 6AM, while the congress critters sleep, fine — every Civil Liberties committee around the country would be gathered and watching in some Law Library, so if you are quietly changing a US Code — they know how to pull the reference up and react. (and know how to react effectively). Same with everything else where there is a community of stakeholders all around the country. They might start doing it in daylight hours and with the Congressional Principles present for the process if such a minor little change given present technology was organized. I think 48 hours between final publication and final vote is fine — but it needs to become fully institutionalized and above all, rooted in how people work politically. Much less of this stuff would happen if spotlights and daylight were focused on the process. You want high priced K-Street operatives to have less power and influence — this would be a way to get there. The Tolman’s of the world who can slip something in are, to the K-Street Firms, heavy ladden in Gold. Afterall, that is what they sell their clients.