I've been watching what the House of Representatives actually does during the week, what the bills and resolutions are, and how my Congressman, John Doolittle (R, CA 04, The Republic of Sierra Dominion Deutchland) has been up to while we're on the indictment watch since the April 13th FBI raid on his house.
Recently we had two developments, one, his chief of staff, Richard "Chuckie" Robinson, resigned, to be replaced by Ron Rogers,another Republican operative who's a partner a big PR firm, Russo Marsh and Rogers, and secondly, the *** ** * ***** got an amendment to a bill passed.
Now, replacing your chief of staff because he's bailing is perfectly understandable because people will do anything for money. And it's so fashionable these days, so many Republicans in the Bush Administration are doing it, poor John probably had used staffer envy and needed to upgrade. But for Pete's Sake, how the **** did this deadest of ducks manage to get an amendment tacked onto a bill that would bolster his race baiting, anti immigrant theme? Where was the speaker of the House when this happened?
The amendment was H. Amend 223, to House Bill, 1427, roll call # 391, May 22, 2007 . It passed, 217 Yays to 205 Nays, with 15 not voting. http://www.govtrack.us/...
The amendment prohibits primary residential mortgage lending to any person who does not have a valid Social Security number.
When I checked the roll call tally on the House site, http://clerk.house.gov/... I was drawing a blank page for some of the recent votes, so I went to govtrack.us/congress instead.
•Update as I proofread links, the clerk of the House page I had linked for Tuesday's actions just disapeared due to a "redesign" in the last hour since I started this. Un****ing unbelievable. Try this and scroll down about halfway to roll call 391, the Doolittle amendment: http://clerk.house.gov/... If this does not work, try clicking on May 22 on the calender page.
Look at the record of the vote. Since it passed with several Democrats voting for it, I looked to see who was not going along with the Democratic leadership on this particular amendment... and found Pelosi's vote missing.
Okay, she's the speaker, she's a busy woman, she's got a lot to do, she doesn't vote on all the little amendments here and there, just the bigger items. This is not a Pelosi bashing diary. But I want to know why she was absent from trying to at least thwart this, because it's a no brainer. John Doolittle spent most of his last campaign repeatedly, viciously bashing her and her "San Francisco values" and making sure that every constituent in his district knew the end of the civilized world was coming if she ended up Speaker of the House with a Democratic majority.
It looks like from her official House site she was in Washington, DC, today. http://www.house.gov/... But the last time she voted on anything was May 17th, last thursday, 5 days ago. http://www.govtrack.us/...
Let's get a few things straight right now.
John Doolittle is under investigation by the Department of Justice. He is, in other words, a cornered, desperate rat.
John Doolittle, neocon, hard core warmongering, sexist Republican, will do everything in his power to make trouble for all Democrats and Pelosi, specifically.
John Doolittle is not resigning from his House seat anytime soon. He is running a disinformation campaign, and he's just hired a person as chief of staff whos specializes in swift boating and official government propoganda on the Iraq war via Move America Forward: http://solongjohn.blogspot.com/...
http://www.sourcewatch.org/...
http://www.sourcewatch.org/...
And here's Move America Forward's actual website: http://www.moveamericaforward.com/
Please click on that link, if nothing else, to get a feel for the style our new congressional chief of staff here in CA- 04.
See that yellow ad for "Coffee for the Troops" on the upper left? Doolittle's new chief of staff, Ron Rogers, sells it on his website. Patriotic, eh? Caffeine works well against IED's.
John Doolittle came back to his district from winter vacation and immediately started spreading the cover up story for the firing of US Atty Carol Lam by saying at his public appearances the #1 problem facing this country was illegal immigration, which we now know is code for white supremist appeal to the Republican base, and supposedly was the reason that Carol Lam was fired, because of her supposedly not prosecuting those types of cases, which we now know is a crock. Carol Lam indicted Brent Wilkes (and Dusty Foggo, CIA) on her last day in office, and Brent Wilkes gave money to Doolittle in return for Defense Department earmarks of $37 million. Julie Doolittle, remember, collected 15% of every campaign dollar donated to Doolittle in the last election (and many of the ones before that...)
This bill amendment is a p/o/s for several reasons, one, it duplicates identity functions already performed on the state level when one takes out a loan, secondly, your mortgage broker is not the Immigration Police, thirdly, and most importantly, is the sheer breadth of hypocrisy involved because the Republican Party has been seeking foreign capital to invest in this country and hold notes on all sorts of things, including commerical real estate. So I don't even know if this is constitutional, but it is vastly, outrageously hypocritical when you look at the budding relationship between the Republicans and Chinese investors.
But now John Doolittle is going to be able to come back to his district during the Memorial Day break and crow triumphantly about his success in keeping the Mexican hordes from invading Roseville at his next fundraiser, which validates his Rove conspiracy theme that Carol Lam was fired for being "soft on border issues" instead of the truth that she was getting closer to indicting standing Republican Congressmen. Was Brent Wilkes involved with Jack Abramoff via Ed Buckham, Tom Delay's ex staffer and then a lobbyist? Is Duke Cunningham in jail right now? Would John Doolittle be very highly motivated to get that Lam's expanding DOJ investigation slowed down or completely derailed? Of course. Here is a good background story on their relationship written last year in the San Diego Union Tribune: http://www.signonsandiego.com/...
Somebody's staffers are not paying attention here. Because this particular piece of useless Republican protoplasm shouldn't be able to get Republican themed race baiting amendments thru the House like that, with a bleeping DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY, without somebody raising holy hell.