Conservative Blogger: Pelosi Changes the Rules...

Flash from The Drudge Report:

PELOSI LOWERS THE BOOM

Wed May 16 2007 14:43:59 ET

After losing a string of embarrassing votes on the House floor because of procedural maneuvering, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has decided to change the current House Rules to completely shut down the floor to the minority.

The Democratic Leadership is threatening to change the current House Rules regarding the Republican right to the Motion to Recommit or the test of germaneness on the motion to recommit. This would be the first change to the germaneness rule since 1822.

In protest, the House Republicans are going to call procedural motions every half hour.

Developing...

Sour grapes. That's all this is. They can't get their agenda through so she's going to completely shut the minority--that's the Republicans--out of the floor. So, the lesson to learn here is apparently when you don't like what the opposition is doing within the confines of the rules, you change them mid-stream.

Disgusting.

UPDATE: Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) has more at his blog:

House Republicans are shutting down the floor, because the Democrats are threatening to change a rule and deny Republicans any opportunity to offer a motion to recommit on the "paygo" provisions of their legislation. That’s a lot of wonky talk; bottom line - the Democrats are preventing their Members from having to vote on the tax increases that they are trying to impose on the American People.

UPDATE - 8:57pm EDT: Rep. Cantor has updated his blog and apparently Madame Speaker has done something she does in vast quantities normally: she blinked...

House Democrats wanted to change the rules to make it easier to raise taxes. They wanted to hide their Members from a direct vote on the tough issues. They wanted to change rules on minority floor rights that have been in place since 1822. They failed.

Today, House Republicans stood united and successfully fought against the House Democrats' ill-advised rule changes, by reducing all business on the House Floor to a crawl. We used a creative set of motions and other parliamentary techniques to bring the fight.

In the end, House Democrats lost and the American People won.

Indeed we did.

William Smith
ConservativeBlogger.com

Posted by WilliamSmith on May 16, 2007 03:00 PM to Conservative Blogger