THE LOW POST: Tasting Their Own Medicine

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I turned on C-Span the other morning, expecting to watch the latest chapter in the purification-by-fire of Alberto Gonzales, and saw an amazing thing. It was so amazing and so hilarious that I coughed hot coffee all over my new laptop. Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Republican of Florida, was howling on the House floor about the lack of "openness" demonstrated by the new Democratic leadership.

"In bill after bill after bill," he shouted, "the minority is closed out!"

Diaz-Balart...you really have to see this guy to believe him. His public speaking method is something truly awesome to behold. Imagine a Mummenschanz dancer trying to pass a drunk test after downing a bottle of strychnine, and you've got Diaz-Balart explaining himself in Congress. He waves his hands and head spasmodically as he talks, and sometimes actually adds words to match his twitches and gestures that make no sense and do not necessarily relate to the subject at hand.

"It's not theory, not height, not almost closed -- it's a closed rule!" he shouted, demonstrating the nonsensical added word "height" by making a "high-low" gesture with his hands.

The issue at hand -- the reason the esteemed Florida congressman was addressing the House floor -- was the failure of the Democrats to allow an "open rule" in the matter of the Gulf Coast Recovery Act, an aid package directed to hurricane victims. An "open rule" is a bill that is sent to the House floor without any restrictions on the number or type of amendments majority or minority members might want to tack on. For instance, a few years ago, when the reauthorization of the Patriot Act was sent to the House floor, Vermont's Bernie Sanders submitted an amendment to restrict government access to citizens' library records. The Republicans who controlled the Rules committee at the time rejected that and other amendments, and sent a closed rule to the floor.

They did that a lot in those years. In the two years of the 109th Congress, the Republicans allowed only one completely open rule. This was a reflection of a decades-long general evolution in congressional procedure away from bipartisanship and in the direction of unilateralism. The trend really began with the Democrats -- in 1977, when the Democrats were the majority party, eighty-five percent of all bills went to the floor as open rules. By 1994, when the Democrats were kicked out of power, that number had dropped to thirty percent. Particularly during the Reagan years, congressional Democrats had turned the House floor into something of a bully pulpit. And guess who led the Republican charge in bitching about it? You guessed it, Mr. Strychnine-Mummenschanz himself, Lincoln Diaz-Balart. This is the congressman's remarks on the subject back in 1994: