Committee Flap Points Up Familiar Power Play

When congressional Democrats denounced the Republicans on Monday for drowning out their minority voice in the House -- dramatized when a GOP committee chairman called the police to help break a partisan stalemate last Friday -- they knew whereof they spoke.

In 40 years in the majority, House Democrats used their own toolbox of tactics to keep the GOP powerless and downtrodden.

Republicans’ howls of protest helped fuel their ouster of Democrats from power in 1994. That’s why some Republicans were dismayed that House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield) opened their party last week to charges that they had become as tyrannical as the Democrats they ousted.

“We obviously are guilty of some of the same misdeeds as the Democrats were for two generations,” said Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Science Committee. “But when you’ve had year after year of having things shoved down your throat, there’s a tendency to respond in kind.”

Said a former aide to House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who rode to power by accusing Democrats in general -- and former Speaker Jim Wright of Texas in particular -- of corruption: “I thought it would take us longer to get as arrogant as the Democrats were, but it doesn’t seem to be.”

Wright was renowned for his heavy-handed use of power while he was speaker from 1986 to 1989. His rules committee devised ingenious maneuvers to make it much harder for Republican measures to prevail.

He once had a Democrat hauled to the well of the House to change his vote on a crucial bill. He did that after arbitrarily adjourning the House at midday and then immediately opening a new session to circumvent a rule requiring a day to pass before he could ram through a piece of legislation.

“The charge that House Republicans are more tyrannical than House Democrats under Jim Wright is clearly open to question,” said William F. Connelly Jr., a political scientist at Washington & Lee University.

But one thing House Democrats never resorted to was calling in the police. With the episode Friday, Democrats believe that they may have a political weapon they had lacked before: an episode easily understood by the public that crosses a line even power-hungry Democrats never crossed.

“Republicans are nearing a decade of control of the House and they have gotten more cocky, more arrogant,” said Tom Eisenhauer, spokesman for House Democratic Caucus Chairman Martin Frost of Texas. “They are crossing lines you only cross when you are drunk on your own power.”

House Democrats met late Monday to plot their next step in a controversy that erupted last Friday, when Thomas called a meeting to vote on a complex pension bill. Democrats complained that they had not seen the text until a few hours earlier.

Democrats sought refuge in a back room Friday, leaving behind only Rep. Pete Stark of Hayward to delay the proceedings. Thomas sent his staff to summon the Capitol police to extricate the Democrats from the back. The Democrats refused to budge, then called the media. No arrests were made, and the Democrats eventually left the room voluntarily.

Republicans offered a different version of events. They contended that Thomas summoned the police because he feared that things would get out of hand after Stark called Rep. Scott McInnis (R-Colo.) a “wimp” and a “fruitcake.”

The flap spilled onto the House floor when Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) offered a measure to reproach Thomas and invalidate the committee approval of the pension bill. Her measure was rejected on a party-line vote.

House Democrats, meeting behind closed doors Monday, considered calling for an investigation. And Pelosi promised “disruptive” tactics to tie up the House all week.

“This will be a week from hell for the Republicans,” Pelosi said.

For Republicans, the flap posed a test of House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert’s leadership. The Illinois Republican enjoys a reputation for being less partisan than his predecessor, Gingrich, and some of his own lieutenants. But he has given Thomas and other committee chairmen considerable running room. Friday’s episode left him clearly dismayed -- and he has not limited his criticism to Democrats’ conduct.

“I think a lot of that behavior on some folks’ part, on both sides of the aisle, smacked of third-grade behavior,” Hastert said on “Fox News Sunday.” “People ought to grow up.”

Rep. Rob Portman of Ohio, another member of the GOP leadership and chief author of the pension bill, was “not pleased with either side,” a GOP leadership aide said.

Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.), a senior Ways and Means member, said the best way to put the matter behind them was to have another committee meeting to reconsider the pension bill -- which enjoys bipartisan support. Some sources said Thomas might resist what might seem an admission of wrongdoing the first time around.

Some Republicans expressed concern that the flap could further compound difficulties facing two major bills that Thomas is shepherding through House-Senate negotiations: one overhauling Medicare, another extending tax credits to low-income families with children.

Both bills are languishing, and the Ways and Means imbroglio may extinguish any hope of completing them before Congress’ August recess.

The controversy spotlighted a political dynamic that has demoralized Democrats for months but has been hard for them to turn into a popular issue. Democrats have repeatedly accused the Republican majority -- and its pivotal gatekeeper of legislation, the rules committee -- of ramming legislation through the chamber without giving Democrats an opportunity to present alternatives.

Their complaints echo what Republicans said about Democrats when they ran the show. “The Democratic leadership is trying to turn the rules committee into the stranglehold on this institution that it was 30 years ago,” then-Rep. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said in 1987, referring to the autocratic role the committee played in blocking liberal bills in the early 1960s.

Both parties have justified their efforts to restrict debate on legislation as part of the requirements of managing a big, unwieldy institution.

But Democrats say that argument smacks of hypocrisy when it comes from the heirs to Gingrich, who made complaints about legislative strictures part of his indictment of what he called a corrupt Democratic majority.

“This is a Republican Congress that campaigned as a group of reformers,” Eisenhauer said. “They have been proven hypocrites.”