You know, at first I thought you were right and believed that some overzealous staffer, who should surely be fired, was responsible. Then...well, I'll let Representative Louise Slaughter explain:
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M. Speaker. After being brought to task by the American people for meddling in the personal and private life decisions of an American family during the Schiavo tragedy, you would think the Majority in this Congress would have learned...
You would think that they would have learned that the people of this country don’t want the government intruding into the lives of American families… But they haven’t learned M. Speaker, because here they go again.
This bill is another an invasion into the private lives of American families, and it is an invasion into the legal rights afforded to all women in this country.
I am talking about the legal right for women to choose, which is afforded by the Supreme Court of the United States.
We have a duty in this body to consider legislation which will maximize our freedom and equality, values which are the very fabric of our society.
Our job here is to protect the legal rights of those we serve, not take them away. And I urge a no vote on its passage.
But I want to talk for a minute about another abuse which has occurred in this chamber, a personal affront to three of our colleagues I have never witnessed in my near twenty years serving in this House.
The Rules Committee discovered yesterday that the Judiciary Committee Report on this very bill, which was authored by the Majority Staff, contained amendment summaries which had been re-written by committee staff for the sole purpose of distorting the original intent of the authors.
This Committee Report took liberty to mischaracterize and even falsify the intent of several amendments offered in Committee by Democratic Members of this body.
At least five amendments to this bill, which were designed to protect the rights of family members and innocent bystanders from prosecution under this bill, were rewritten as amendments designed to protect sexual predators from prosecution and were then included in the committee report as if that was the original intent of the authors. The thing is, sexual predators were not mentioned anywhere in any of these amendments.
These amendments were no more about sexual predators then they were about terrorists or arsonists or any other criminal class in our society.
These amendments were about the rights of grandmothers and siblings and clergy and innocent bystanders.
I asked the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee about this deception yesterday afternoon at the Rules Committee hearing.
And instead of decrying what I certainly expected would be revealed as a mistake by an overzealous staffer...The Chairman stood by those altered amendment descriptions.
He made very clear to the Rules Committee that the alterations to these members’ amendments were deliberate.
When pressed as to why his committee staff took such an unprecedented action, the Chairman immediately offered up his own anger over the manner in which Democrats had chosen to debate and oppose this unfortunate piece of legislation we have before us today.
In fact…He said, and I quote... "You don’t like what we wrote about your amendments, and we don’t like what you said about our bill."
To falsely rewrite the intent of an amendment submitted by another member, to intentionally distort its description as being designed to protect sexual predators, is no different than accusing a fellow member of Congress as being an apologist for sexual predators themselves.
That is in effect what the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee has done here, with all deliberation.
And he has ensured that these amendment descriptions will be encapsulated in the record for all time by including those unfair and incorrect amendment summaries in the Committee report.
This is a new low for this chamber M. Speaker.
This is a clearly dishonest, unethical attack on the credibility and character of another member. And sadly, it is just the latest in a pattern of unethical and abusive tactics employed by this Majority.
How incredibly arrogant is this majority...that they believe they have the right to tamper with official congressional documents for their own political purposes?
How unbelievably arrogant is the leadership of this Congress…that they would force their own politicized interpretation of another members work upon this body, and upon the American people, in an official committee report?
The Majority’s actions are not only an affront to all members of this house, but they are also an affront to the American people.
There is no question that we can debate and disagree over the impact a bill will have.
We can argue over how well it has been written or what language it should include to be more effective. But regardless of how that debate turns out, the caption on the top of that bill or amendment serves to instruct the American people as to what original intent of that legislation was.
It serves as an unbiased reading on what that amendment aims to accomplish.
To falsify and rewrite that description as a political attack, is not only unprecedented, it is fundamentally dishonest and it is an abuse of the power given to the Majority by the American people.
And I have no doubts Mr. Speaker, no doubts, that unless the congressional record is amended to reflect the true captions of these amendments, then we will surely see these erroneous captions again in the form of campaign attack mail pieces.
In fact, when we pressed last night in the Rules Committee to have the record amended to reflect the honest and accurate captions that belong on those amendments, we were defeated on a party line vote.
So now, these honorable and hardworking Members of Congress will be forever branded in the official record as having offered amendments which were designed to protect sexual predators, when nothing, nothing could be further from the truth.
M Speaker, I have often heard the Chairman of the Rules Committee as well as other Republicans talk about the loss of civility in this chamber.
But perhaps they will be the last to realize, that in order to regain some of that lost civility, they need look no further than their own abusive, unethical and arrogant administration of this House of Representatives.
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Link.
The key sections are in bold. The point being, this was a deliberate action taken by the Republicans and, when confronted with it, they refused to change their obvious distortions and lies.
And hrdwareguy, this isn't a debate over the merits of parental notification laws. I have an opinion on that, as I imagine many do, but this isn't the tread for that. This thread is about the deliberate distortion of Democrat amendments by Republicans in order to make it seem as though Democrats were trying in some way to protect sexual predators.
As to this, hrdwareguy:
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All the people listed in the article have the potential to be sexual preditors and excluding them from prosecution of getting your daughter an abortion you had no knowledge of is not right.
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With all due respect, what the fuck are you talking about? The legislation and amendments at hand had NOTHING to do with sexual predators. Are you saying that it is OK to characterize any law as defending sexual predators because any individual at all has the possibility of being one? Do you know how, um, silly that is?
Lastly, hrdwareguy, if you can provide me with one single shred of evidence that Democrats have ever altered the official House or Senate reports on Republican amendments at any time in the entire history of the United States of America, I'll shut up. If you can't, don't call this politics as usual, because it is far from that.