Our beloved friends at the New York Times, are busily at work stirring the pot. Carl Hulse reports this morning that "Leadership Tries to Restrain Fiefs in New Congress" and then goes on to list the agreement between committe chairs and the new leadership!
Misleading headlines, R Us...
You can read the whole silly thing right here.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 — Less than 24 hours after taking over as speaker, Representative Nancy Pelosi summoned the new chairmen of five committees with responsibility for various aspects of Iraq policy to her office to review and coordinate plans for hearings and inquiries.
The gathering on Friday would have been unthinkable when Democrats last controlled the House. In the days before the 1994 Republican takeover, all-powerful Democratic chairmen ruled their committees with impunity, doing what they wanted, when they wanted, with little regard to the views of the speaker or others in the upper ranks.
Ok, so different people in a different era operated under different rules. Having nothing else to say, Hulse now moves to setting up straw men (and women) so he will have a topic for this article.
Now the new Democratic leaders of the House and Senate want to avoid a return to that era by forging a working relationship with the men and women who will actually write the bills and lead the Congressional investigations. Top lawmakers acknowledge that finding a way to keep the overarching goals of the party from clashing with the objectives of the independent chairmen will be crucial to keeping Democratic control from spiraling out of control.
"Already there are signs of discord", Mr. Hulse tells us.
Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the Finance Committee chairman who has been a headache for past Democratic leaders, says he will plunge ahead with hearings next week on giving the government power to negotiate Medicare drug prices with pharmaceutical companies — a top Democratic priority he has opposed and one the House plans to speed through with no new scrutiny.
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, and Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan are all sited as potential problems for the leadership for promising to do their job.
Then we are told:
The initial Democratic legislative program is not being routed through committee — perhaps not even the Rules Committee. But Mr. [Barney] Frank and others said the new chairmen were comfortable with that approach if it helped to make a quick impression.
Turning to the Senate, we find:
Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, the chairman of the Banking Committee, said Mr. Reid had already diplomatically sounded him out on his plans. "We are very much in sync on this," said Mr. Dodd, who is considering legislation to protect consumers from credit card marketing fraud and high-risk mortgages. "I am not going to do anything without letting Harry Reid know what we are going to do."
Now, let's see if I have this right. In the past Democratic Leaders in both Houses had difficulty controlling Committee Chairs. Some of the "Old Bulls" were too independent and could not be reigned in. Ergo, if Democrats are back in control, past must be prologue.
This, in spite of the copious comments from those very Chairs, throughout the article, that cooperation and consultation were a very important element in making this transition work.
Isn't this just another one of those heavy handed attempts to try and make the Dems look like a bunch of out-of-control, fringe folk, undisiplined, and unpredictable?
Another MSM Authoritarian, longing for the lock-step predictability of Right Wing domination, rears his very ugly head. Misleading headline, unrelated quotes, and text which belies his whole point as a weapon to attack a Congress that has not met in full session, yet.
Nice going, NYT!