Conservatives Without Conscience

Proponents of the Contract with America had claimed the “Democrats’ ironhanded one-party rule of the House of Representatives over the last four decades led to arcane, arbitrary, and often secretive procedures that disenfranchised millions of Americans from representation in Congress,” reported one congressional scholar.[20] Indeed, their long stint in power had given them a hubris, arrogance, and sense of invulnerability that had eroded the effective operation of the House. Republicans, in fact, had a valid complaint, and at the time they took control there was indeed a need for reform. But that is not what happened. If Democrats had run the House with an iron hand, Republicans were employing a iron fist at the behest of their leadership’s autocratic rule.[21] Gingrich lorded over the House. Where power was once decentralized among committee chairmen who had earned their posts and fiefdoms through seniority, Gingrich eliminated the seniority system and had chairmen selected by the leadership, concentrating power in the Speaker’s office.[*] But while Gingrich was autocratic (answering to no one else), he was not dictatorial (imposing his will on others). Dictatorship in the House would not occur until DeLay held full sway, which occurred with Gingrich’s departure. By the time of the arrival of Bush and Cheney in 2001, House Republican leaders had imposed iron-clad controls on “the people’s House,” making it their own, with ambitions of assuming permanent authority.

Accordingly, “[m]ore radical changes, at the expense of democracy itself, have occurred since 2002 under Tom DeLay,” explained the seasoned Washington observer Robert Kuttner, the cofounder and coeditor of The American Prospect.[22] Kuttner was one of the first to write about the authoritarian inclination of these conservatives (although he does not use the term) in a chilling analysis entitled “America as a One-Party State: Today’s hard right seeks total dominion. It’s packing the courts and rigging the rules. The target is not the Democrats but democracy itself.” Kuttner focused on Congress, more specifically on the House of Representatives, and by 2002, he found, there was good reason to describe DeLay’s operation as a “dictatorship.” He also refuted the Republican claim that when the Democrats were in control they exercised the same leadership style, for what the Republicans have done to the House was beyond anything even imaginable by the Democrats. Kuttner focused on several means employed by the authoritarian conservatives to exercise control. Following I have quoted or paraphrased them, while adding a few thoughts of my own.

Extreme Centralization. The legislative agenda of the House is (and always has been) controlled by the Speaker and the Committee on Rules.[*] Kuttner explained that, unlike their predecessors, Tom DeLay and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (whose chief of staff, Scott Palmer, he considered “as powerful as DeLay”) practically write laws themselves. “Drastic revisions to bills approved by committee are characteristically added by the leadership, often late in the evening,” Kuttner observed. “Under the House rules, 48 hours are supposed to elapse before floor action. But in 2003, the leadership, 57 percent of the time, wrote rules declaring bills to be ‘emergency’ measures, allowing them to be considered with as little as 30 minutes’ notice. On several measures, members literally did not know what they were voting for.”

No Amendments. When the GOP took control of the House they promised they would do better than the Democrats, assuring all “that at least 70 percent of bills would come to the floor with rules permitting amendments.” That did not happen; in fact, the opposite occurred. The “proportion of bills prohibiting amendments has steadily increased,” from 56 percent the first year Republicans took control to 76 percent when Kuttner last examined them. Even these numbers understate the situation, Kuttner explained, since “all major bills now come to the floor with rules prohibiting amendments.”

One-Party Conferences. The Republican-controlled Senate has not yet stopped floor amendments, so when a Senate bill differs from a House bill, members are appointed by each body to confer and resolve the differences. Republicans, however, have cut both House and Senate Democrats out of the conferences. The Republicans meet, work out any differences, and then send a nonamendable bill back to each body for a quick up-or-down vote. Kuttner noted that members may be given a day to study bills exceeding a thousand pages, with “much of it written from scratch in conference.” This is a practice that was once considered unacceptable by both parties.