Making Sausage
Jul 28th, 2005 at 4:42 pm by Susie
Sam Rosenfeld dissects the tactics that worked for the Republicans last night:
Where to begin on last night’s CAFTA vote? The Washington Post’s write-up provides some of the juicier details of the Republican leadership’s strong-arm shenanigans:
The 217 to 215 vote came just after midnight, in a dramatic finish that highlighted the intensity brought by both sides to the battle. When the usual 15-minute voting period expired at 11:17 p.m., the no votes outnumbered the yes votes by 180 to 175, with dozens of members undeclared. House Republican leaders kept the voting open for another 47 minutes, furiously rounding up holdouts in their own party until they had secured just enough to ensure approval.
Let’s pause for a moment to recall, for the umpteenth time, the centerpiece of the old Republican minority’s critique of the pre-1994 Democratic majority’s arrogance and abuse of power: Speaker Jim Wright’s 1987 move to hold the voting period open another 15 minutes to round up a straggling Democratic vote on a bill, a then-unprecedented extension of the voting time that a certain congressman Dick Cheney called “the greatest abuse of democracy� he’d ever seen.
Cheney was able to say that then because the George W. Bush administration was still off in the future. He certainly wouldn’t be able to say that today.