To: i-node who wrote (537616 ) 12/20/2009 12:29:02 PM From: Alighieri Read Replies (1) | Respond to OJ Simpson walked out of a California courtroom a free man, LEGALLY. That didn't make it right. But I defy you to point to ANY piece of substantial legislation in history that has been done in this way. In early 2003, while the House bill was being drafted, Democrats and Republicans authored 59 sensible amendments to it. At the behest of the Republican leadership, however, the House Committee on Rules rejected all but one, preventing them from being debated by Congress. Many of those amendments — among them, one requiring the administration to use beneficiaries' collective purchasing power to negotiate lower prices and one allowing Americans to import cheaper drugs from Canada — would have made the legislation far more effective and probably would have received bipartisan support, had they been allowed onto the floor. Next, the conference process, whereby the House and Senate versions of legislation are reconciled, was fundamentally corrupted and kept almost entirely secret by senior Republicans. Democrats on the conference committee were excluded from deliberations, to the point of being physically barred from the conference room on one occasion. The pharmaceutical industry, however, was invited in. The chairman of the Commerce Committee, Representative Billy Tauzin (R-La.), coauthored the bill while negotiating a $2-million-per-year job as a lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the drug industry's trade organization. The top Republican aide on a subcommittee involved in writing the legislation also left his position soon afterward to lobby for PhRMA. Thomas Scully, the administration's top Medicare official, deliberately understated the program's projected cost by $134 billion, and when the chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) objected, Scully reportedly threatened to fire him if he shared his true estimate with Congress. Soon after the legislation passed, Scully resumed his career as a health care–industry lobbyist. When the conference report was brought to the House for a vote, members were given less than one day to read the 850-page bill, a violation of House rules. When the vote was called at almost 3 a.m., voting Democrats stood unanimously with 22 Republicans in opposing the legislation. Had the vote been gaveled down in the customary 15 minutes, the bill would not have passed. So the Republican leadership held the vote open for a record three hours while attempting to change the outcome — through intimidation and other tactics that, again, violated House rules. Finding itself with a narrow lead at 5:53 a.m., the Republican leadership immediately brought the vote to a close. Representative Nick Smith (R-Mich.) later revealed what may have been the worst: that former Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Representative Candice Miller (R-Mich.) tried to bribe him with political favors to change his vote — an infraction for which the House Ethics Committee later admonished them.
