Pelosi Overturns Century-Old House Rules

[wakeupamerica]

IT IS TIME TO LET PELOSI AND REID KNOW WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT THEIR POWER GRAB AND LYING TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

In a naked power grab for Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has angered Republicans by pushing through a rule change to curb the GOP’s rights to affect legislation.

The rule change — approved on Tuesday, the first day of the 111th Congress — puts new restrictions on motions to “recommit” a bill to the committee that approved it in order to add new amendments.

Previously Republicans have used the rule to delay or kill legislation or to force Democrats to take politically difficult votes on such issues as gun control and illegal immigration, according to The Hill newspaper.

The new rule allows the full House to reconsider a bill without delay.

The move, which Pelosi engineered, “silences the voices of tens of millions of Americans by further shutting down open debate on the House floor and taking away the minority’s right to offer substantive policy alternatives on behalf of the millions of Americans they represent,” Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio complained.

And Rep. David Drier of California, ranking Republican on the House Rules Committee, said the rule change would create “the most closed Congress in history.”

Before the vote on the bill, GOP leaders sent a letter to Pelosi stating: “This is not the kind of openness and transparency that President-elect Obama promised.”

Democrats argue that Republicans overused the “recommit” tactic in the previous Congress in an effort to derail immediate votes, the Washington Times reported.

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said Republicans had used the tactic 50 times in the two years since Democrats took control of the House, compared with only 36 times when the Democrats were in the minority from 1995 to 2007.

In the Senate, the threat of a filibuster gives the minority party leverage, but in the House, the minority has few tools to challenge the majority’s will, the Times noted.

Now, without the recommit tactic, which had been in place for 100 years, it will become “harder to cut taxes,” Rep. Boehner said in remarks reported by CNS News.

“Under existing rules, if Democrats bring a bill to the floor that includes a tax increase, Republicans could motion to send the bill back to committee and strike the tax hike, but the majority’s rules package takes this option away.”

Also on Tuesday, Democrats, who hold a 257-178 majority in the House, approved a measure to eliminate the six-year term limit for committee chairmen, one of the reforms of the “Contract with America” agenda adopted by Republicans after they took control of the House in 1995.

Boehner said in a letter to Pelosi that eliminating the six-year restriction “will entrench a handful of members of the House in positions of permanent power, with little regard for its impact on the American people.”