Democrats seek to Abolish 2-Party System by Eliminating Open Debate & Bill Amendment

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Pelosi Reverses House Fairness Rules

by Connie Hair
01/05/2009

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to re-write House rules today to ensure that the Republican minority is unable to have any influence on legislation. Pelosi’s proposals are so draconian, and will so polarize the Capitol, that any thought President-elect Obama has of bipartisan cooperation will be rendered impossible before he even takes office. Pelosi’s rule changes -- which may be voted on today -- will reverse the fairness rules that were written around Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.”

In reaction, the House Republican leadership is sending a letter today to Pelosi to object to changes to House Rules this week that would bar Republicans from offering alternative bills, amendments to Democrat bills or even the guarantee of open debate accessible by motions to recommit for any piece of legislation during the entire 111th Congress. These procedural abuses, as outlined in the below letter obtained by HUMAN EVENTS, would also include the repeal of six-year limit for committee chairmen and other House Rules reform measures enacted in 1995 as part of the Contract with America.

After decades of Democrat control of the House of Representatives, gross abuses to the legislative process and several high-profile scandals contributed to an overwhelming Republican House Congressional landslide victory in 1994. Reforms to the House Rules as part of the Contract with America were designed to open up to public scrutiny what had become under this decades-long Democrat majority a dangerously secretive House legislative process. The Republican reform of the way the House did business included opening committee meetings to the public and media, making Congress actually subject to federal law, term limits for committee chairmen ending decades-long committee fiefdoms, truth in budgeting, elimination of the committee proxy vote, authorization of a House audit, specific requirements for blanket rules waivers, and guarantees to the then-Democrat minority party to offer amendments to pieces of legislation.

Pelosi’s proposed repeal of decades-long House accountability reforms exposes a tyrannical Democrat leadership poised to assemble legislation in secret, then goose-step it through Congress by the elimination of debate and amendment procedures as part of America’s governing legislative process. Below is the text of the letter on which the House Republican leadership has signed off.

January 5, 2009

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House
H-232, U.S. Capitol
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Madame Speaker,

We hope you and your family had a joyful holiday season, and as we begin a new year and a new Congress, we look forward to working with you, our colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and President-elect Obama in tackling the many challenges facing our nation.

President Obama has pledged to lead a government that is open and transparent. With that in mind, we are deeply troubled by media reports indicating that the Democratic leadership is poised to repeal reforms put in place in 1995 that were intended to help restore Americans’ trust and confidence in the People’s House. Specifically, these reports note that the Majority, as part of its rules package governing the new Congress, will end six-year term limits for Committee chairs and further restrict the opportunity for all members to offer alternative legislation. This does not represent change; it is reverting back to the undemocratic one-party rule and backroom deals that the American people rejected more than a decade ago. And it has grave implications for the American people and their freedom, coming at a time when an unprecedented expansion of federal power and spending is being hastily planned by a single party behind closed doors. Republicans will vigorously oppose repealing these reforms if they are brought to a vote on the House floor.

As you know, after Republicans gained the majority in the House in 1995, our chamber adopted rules to limit the terms of all committee chairs to three terms in order to reward new ideas, innovation, and merit rather than the strict longevity that determined chairmanships in the past. This reform was intended to help restore the faith and trust of the American people in their government – a theme central to President-elect Obama’s campaign last year. He promoted a message of “change,” but Madame Speaker, abolishing term limit reform is the opposite of “change.” Instead, it will entrench a handful of Members of the House in positions of permanent power, with little regard for its impact on the American people.

The American people also stand to pay a price if the Majority further shuts down free and open debate on the House floor by refusing to allow all members the opportunity to offer substantive alternatives to important legislation -- the same opportunities that Republicans guaranteed to Democrats as motions to recommit during their 12 years in the Minority. The Majority’s record in the last Congress was the worst in history when it came to having a free and open debate on the issues.

This proposed change also would prevent Members from exposing and offering proposals to eliminate tax increases hidden by the Democratic Majority in larger pieces of legislation. This is not the kind of openness and transparency that President-elect Obama promised. This change would deprive tens of millions of Americans the opportunity to have a voice in the most important policy decisions facing our country.

Madame Speaker, we urge you to reconsider the decision to repeal these reforms, which could come up for a vote as early as tomorrow. Just as a new year brings fresh feelings of optimism and renewal for the American people, so too should a new Congress. Changing the House rules in the manner highlighted by recent media reports would have the opposite effect: further breaching the trust between our nation’s elected representatives and the men and women who send them to Washington to serve their interests and protect their freedom.

Sincerely,

(A copy of the letter with signatures will be available on HUMAN EVENTS later today.)

[American Patriot]

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

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Changes in Democratic Rules Package Stiffs Americans

Washington, DC, Jan 9 -

One of the first orders of business at the start of each Congress is the adoption of rules by which the Chamber will be governed. This is typically a perfunctory matter as the majority party drafts the rules, and passes them on the strength of its greater number of Members. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t rife with politics, as Americans learned earlier this week when they observed the shenanigans perpetrated by the Democratic Leadership.

The rules package for the 111th Congress incorporates some big changes from last year. Although consideration of the rules package is very much inside baseball, it has real consequences. One particularly egregious change will stifle the rights of the Minority party to offer alternatives to legislation on the House floor through a process called the Motion to Recommit. Largely used to remove tax hikes or excessive spending in bills, the process still requires a majority of votes from both Republicans and Democrats.

On several occasions since the 2006 elections, when the Democrats first took back control of the House, major pieces of legislation have been brought to the House floor without going through the regular committee process. This has effectively shut Republicans out of the deliberative process, requiring us to use floor procedures in order to mend bad bills, and bring some fairness to the business of the House from the tyrannical rule of the Democratic Leadership. These procedures gave us a chance to be heard on bills that were otherwise bereft of Republican input.

Procedural fairness is the antithesis of partisanship, and stripping the Minority party of its rights sets a very partisan tone right off the bat. That’s what I said on the floor of the House when I spoke against the rules package on Tuesday. When the Minority party in the House is treated unfairly, it sets the stage for more partisanship. This is contrary to the message of President-elect Obama, who energized the vast majority of Americans last year with calls for “change” in Washington. I cannot believe that this is the change he envisioned. On the contrary, this week’s actions by Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic Leadership represent more of the same.

Given the current economic state of affairs in our nation, and the specter of a behemoth $1 trillion economic stimulus package looming in the near future, Congress needs a lot less “Washington politics” mentality, and a lot more of the “change” espoused by the President-elect. Ultimately, many of the larger problems facing Congress this session will require cooperative and bipartisan solutions. And in order to get a good solution, we need a good process. The rules package which will govern this session of Congress is not the auspicious first step I had hoped for, nor what Americans deserve.

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One Party Rule Forever!

By Orson Scott Card
February 16, 2009

Because the mainstream press refuses to see anything wrong in the Obama administration, even the most outrageous actions are given astonishingly gentle treatment -- if they get any treatment at all.

So of course we hear almost nothing about the coup d'etat that is under way in the White House.

People have been talking about a "historic realignment," but of course that is nonsense. Most Americans report mostly conservative viewpoints on most issues. That hasn't changed.

What will change, apparently, is how many voters the Obama administration can produce out of thin air to swing the next election. And as many elections as possible after that.

How is Obama going to accomplish this? He has just moved the constitutionally-required Census from the Commerce Department to the White House -- specifically putting it under the thumb of his political strategist, Rahm Emanuel.

The Census wasn't broke. So why is Obama fixing it?
Here's why it matters:

1. When the Census takes place in 2010, the results will be used to determine which states lose seats in the House of Representatives, and which gain. This also determines which states lose electoral votes, and which gain.

2. For many decades population has been shifting from the big northeastern states to the sunbelt. There is no reason to suppose that the trend is changing, except that California may join the ranks of states losing population this time around.

3. The states that losing seats and electoral votes have been mostly states that Democrats count on to deliver big chunks of their vote. The states that gain have been, as often as not, those that deliver their votes to the Republicans.

Of course, as liberals move from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt, they bring their voting habits with them, and some states that used to be solidly Republican are now swing states. But this is not enough for the Democrats.

Remember, the Democratic Party is the one that tried to steal the 2000 presidential election by a highly selective recount in Florida; and when that didn't work, the solidly liberal Florida supreme court selectively nullified any election law that might prevent the theft of the election. Only the U.S. Supreme Court put a stop to this openly partisan attempt at election theft.

Well, they're at it again. In a nation that is almost evenly divided between Left and Right -- with a slight lean, most of the time, toward the right -- Obama and Emanuel already have the tools that will allow them to do to the country as a whole what was attempted in Florida.

This will be done by the use of statistical manipulation based on highly doubtful premises.

We have been hearing for years about how the homeless, the poor, and illegal immigrants have all been "undercounted" in the census. Either they can't be found -- or they hide from census officials.

Since these groups tend to vote for the Democratic Party, naturally Democrats have been very concerned to make sure these people are counted in the census.

How many of them are there?

Millions, say some.

We have no idea, say the honest.

"But if we don't count them, then the states that bear the biggest burden of dealing with the homeless, the poor, and illegal immigrants don't get their fair share of federal dollars and programs!"

Here's an idea -- adjust those dollars and those programs to target those states.

But no, the Left wants to go after the Census itself. They want to "adjust" the Census by adding "estimated" numbers of uncounted homeless, poor, and illegal immigrants.

This is functionally identical to the practice of the old Democratic Party machine in Illinois, where dead Democratic voters in Chicago turned out in large enough numbers to counterbalance all the Republican votes downstate.

Now it won't matter how many voters there are. If the Census has been jimmied to give Democratic-leaning states more congressional seats and more electoral votes than the actual count of real people would justify, the Democrats will have their "historic realignment" without having to actually persuade anybody new to vote for their candidates.

And Obama has set himself up to rig all future American elections, not through any democratic process, but by fiat. Just like a dictator.
Remember how, when the Patriot Act was passed, we were flooded with outraged stories in the press about how Americans' rights were going to be trampled on?

None of it came true.

But now we have a genuine attack on the roots of the Constitution and the principle of counting only people who can be proven to exist when apportioning the House of Representatives. It's a naked grab for power.
It's a coup d'etat.

And the so-called freedom-lovers in the Leftist media are absolutely silent about it.

If Bush had put Karl Rove in charge of the Census without so much as asking Congress for permission, the howls and screams would have been deafening. Obama does the identical thing ... and the freedom-loving Left is fine with it.

Because they don't love freedom. They just love having their views prevail, without regard to democracy or human rights.

And just in case the American people might hear about this naked power grab by Obama, the Democratic Party hasn't given up yet on their effort to apply the Fairness Doctrine to radio -- and only radio -- so that they can selectively kill free speech and press freedom where it will damage only Republicans and Conservatives.

The Democratic Party has demonstrated, time and time again, their absolute hatred of Democracy. They hated Bush for bringing democracy to Muslim countries that used to sponsor terrorism. They hate it when Americans who disagree with them use their Constitutional rights to speak out for their viewpoint.

And, most of all, they hate democracy when it leads to their losing power. The years of Republican control of Congress made them so insane that they obviously have vowed: Never again.

No matter how stupidly those ordinary Americans vote, they're going to fudge the Census so that Democrats will always keep the White House and the House of Representatives.

If this is allowed to stand, we will never have an honest Census, or an honest election, again.

What can we do?

Lobby your state governments to file suit in the Supreme Court, challenging the right of the President to control the Census.

And if that doesn't work, lobby your state legislatures to call for a new Constitutional Convention in order to pass a Constitutional Amendment that requires that the Census be conducted by an independent agency, which is allowed to count only living people who are actually located and named, with no "estimates" and no fudging.

Obama and Emanuel and others involved in this coup are counting on the media to sweep this under the rug, so that Americans won't get all agitated about something as dull as the Census.

So don't let yourself get bored or distracted. Your vote is about to be discounted. Your most basic freedom as an American -- the right to vote and have a real chance at changing things -- is being taken away.

Check with your friends in Mexico and Cuba and the old Communist bloc about how much they enjoyed generations of one-party rule.
Because that's what Obama decided to try for in his first month in office.