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Originally Posted by loquitur
um, dc_dux? The House pretty much always was run as a one-party dictatorship. Under both parties.
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If you think the House under any recent Democratic Speaker had anything like the Hastert rule, where a "majority of the majority" had to be on board BEFORE even a bill could be brought to the floor for debate or before any amendments could be considered.... or the pervasiveness of flaunting disdain for House rules, I would suggest you recheck your Congressional history.
A NY Times editorial by Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann lay it out pretty well...describing the policies and practices of the Republican majority House:
...Over the past five years (2001-2006), the rules and norms that govern Congressional deliberation, debate and voting - what legislative aficionados call "the regular order" - have routinely been violated, especially in the House of Representatives, and in ways that mark a dramatic break from custom.
Roll call votes on the House floor, which are supposed to take 15 minutes, are frequently stretched to one, two or three hours. Rules forbidding any amendments to bills on the floor have proliferated, stifling dissent and quashing legitimate debate. Omnibus bills, sometimes thousands of pages long, are brought to the floor with no notice, let alone the 72 hours the rules require. Conference committees exclude minority members and cut deals in private, sometimes even adding major provisions after the conference has closed. Majority leaders still pressure members who object to the chicanery to vote yea in the legislation's one up-or-down vote....
...Some of the abuses are straightforward breaches of the rules. The majority Republicans bypass normal procedures and ignore objections that parliamentary rules have been violated. They then reframe substantive issues as procedural matters that demand party discipline. Other abuses do not violate the rules, but they do transgress longstanding practice...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/op...9ornstein.html
As to the Senate and your observation:
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The Senate was supposed to be different. It hasn't worked out that way recently for any number of reasons, with each party saying the other started it, or set it off, or what have you.
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The reason is clear and the record is indisputable:
Nearly 1 in 6 roll-call votes in the Senate this year have been cloture votes. If this pace of blocking legislation continues, this 110th Congress will be on track to roughly triple the previous record number of cloture votes — 58 each in the two Congresses from 1999-2002, according to the Senate Historical Office.
This purely Republican delaying tactic is unprecedented by any measure.
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Also, I would argue that in the Senate, Harry Reid has been a lamentably poor manager of both the Senate and of his own party's Senators. Pelosi not anywhere near as bad over in the House; she's much more in tune with what is achievable. Or so it looks to me.
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On this we agree.
Reid has been a terrible majority leader and Pelosi has been effective as both the party leader in the House and more importantly, as the third most powerful elected official in the country, in presiding over a (small "d") democratic House.