It seems to me the king of ironies that the man slated to replace Tom DeLay as the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, is a man I first encountered in the Rolling Stone article,
"Four Amendments and a Funeral" and described as such.
The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination -- a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish. The official function of the committee is to decide which bills and amendments will be voted on by Congress and also to schedule the parameters of debate. If Rules votes against your amendment, your amendment dies. If you control the Rules Committee, you control Congress.
The current chairman, David Dreier, is a pencil-necked Christian Scientist from Southern California, with exquisite hygiene and a passion for brightly colored ties. While a dependable enough yes man to have remained Rules chairman for six years now, he is basically a human appendage, a prosthetic attachment on the person of the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. "David carries out the wishes of the Republican leadership right down the line,'' said former Texas Congressman Martin Frost, until last year the committee's ranking Democrat.
Not only has Rep. Dreier used his position as head of the Rules Committee to severely undercut the functions of Congress and the Democratic minority voice, he is also a closeted homosexual who has somehow coerced his local newspapers into turning a blind eye to his hypocrisy, as he has repeatedly voted against any bill or measure that would encourage equal protection under the law for gays.
The Raw Story has a very concise article regarding the various cover-ups initiated by MediaNews papers who refuse to cover this story, as well as the efforts of Hustler magazine to unearth the rampant hypocrisy of a man who puts his party over his fellow citizens.
This seems to me to be a great opportunity for Democrats to weaken the Republican machine -- after all, Republicans hate gays, and Democratic constitutents (not politicians) hate hypocritical and corrupt assholes. But what are those odds, really?
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