Recently while registering voters with a group, we ran into a woman who identified herself as an independent. A colleague ran away with the conversation, but this is what I would have said. I think it's a useful meme with independents and moderate Republicans:
Well, have you looked at some things which have been happening in Washington lately?
The Voting Rights Act is due for renewal soon. A bloc of conservative Republican representatives in the House Republican conference objected to it's coming before the House. So it won't.
Both the House and the Senate passed an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Act that the USA can't build permanent military bases in Iraq. The House-Senate conference committee, named by the Republican leadership of the two houses, cut the amendment from the bill.
So, once a moderate Republican House member has voted for Dennis Hastert for speaker, what else he votes for doesn't much matter. The right wing decides what happens.
That's enough for a spiel, more details for your back-up information after the jump.
Much has been made of the Republican majority in Congress. But throughout their "Forty Years in the Wilderness," they seldom had more than 200 Representatives, sometimes they had fewer than 150. The Democrats haven't fallen below 200 in the entire period since '94.
During the period of Democratic majorities, the Republicans had a good deal of influence. They cooperated with conservative Democrats. These often had more power than their numbers deserved because they stayed in Congress forever and rose to be senior members -- and, therefore, chairmen -- of their committees.
When the Republicans got into control, they abolished the rule that the senior member of the committee of the majority party was the chairman. The Republican chairman of a committee is the choice of the Republican leadership. So, the committee doesn't consider anything the right wing doesn't want it to consider.
Conference committees are another dodge to get the right wing in control of the agenda, whatever the majority of members want. The House and the Senate must pass the same bill for it to become law. When a bill passes the two houses in different forms, the bill goes to a Conference Committee," a joint committee named by the leadership of the two houses, to come up with a bill that is a compromise between that passed by the House and that passed by the Senate -- called "reconciliation." Then the bill comes before each house for a vote, without the possibility of amendment. This device, although necessitated by the Constitution, is not mentioned in that document. The GOP figured out that there is nothing in actual law to limit what comes out of the confernce committee to some compromise between what actually goes in. The first ploys they used was inserting minor "earmarks," a requirement to spend some money in the district of one of the members of the committee; instead of letting the original committees look at them, they just put them in during meetings of the conference committee.
Now, they are pushing further and further. They figure that most voters don't know the mechanics of Congress. And the press is too cowed to mention them.