>
Bob Livingston represented Louisiana’s 1st District for 24 years.
Congress is broken.
James Madison’s vision enshrined in the United States Constitution, the world’s most important document second only to the Bible, has been blurred, distorted, and all but forgotten.
Partisanship has overshadowed any thought of working together in the interest of the nation. Partisan loyalty is sacrosanct and any deviation in any of the parties is frowned upon and sanctioned.
Gone are the days when members of Congress could walk across the aisle to produce legislation based on common sense rather than Party dogma.
‘Negotiation’ does not equate to ‘capitulation’. But the insistence on ‘my way or the highway’ often produces what we have seen all too often in recent years: nothing… or much worse.
It is difficult to determine exactly where the problems started.
The Democrats grew arrogant in their 40 years of virtual control of the House of Representatives and near equal domination of the US Senate.
They suffered a cataclysm when, in 1995, Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to seize control of the House. His outrage forced them to file more than 200 frivolous ethics complaints against the new Speaker, but the Republicans managed to contain President Clinton’s wasteful agenda that led him to declare: ‘The era of big government is over.’
The nation benefited as the Republican Congress worked with the Democratic-controlled White House to restrain spending and ultimately balance the discretionary budget for the first time in decades and for the last time in modern history.
The Democrats grew arrogant in their 40 years of virtual control of the House of Representatives and near equal domination of the US Senate.
Mandatory royalty spending was left unrestrained and today is the leading cause of our nation’s continued march toward fiscal disaster.
The future of America is uncertain.
Numerous columns and opinion letters are written every day in the press proclaiming that the end is near. I don’t think they are true, but our government needs drastic reform.
The politicization of our executive agencies is unsustainable. The Biden administration ignores the many thousands of people who cross our borders from around the world bringing drug trafficking, the sex trade, and threats of terrorism to all the peoples of America.
Our fiscal agenda has lost all connection to reality. Inflation is at a 40-year high and rising interest rates threaten our fiscal integrity.
‘Wokism’ has gravitated from our colleges and universities to our elementary and secondary schools, as well as our government agencies, even our Department of Defense.
These trends cannot be sustained and must be reversed. God willing, 2024 will bring a change of administration in the White House and a new direction for the country. Only the American people will determine if that can happen.
But Congress can start the changes today.
The Republicans have retaken control of the House, albeit with an incredibly slim majority. My message to them is simply: ‘Don’t repeat the mistakes of your predecessors!’
Much has been written about Nancy Pelosi’s effectiveness as president. Granted, she was a very successful autocrat. A true believer in her leftist agenda, Ms. Pelosi emasculated the committee process and took full control of all legislation so that no bills or amendments would be allowed on the floor without her endorsement.
He rarely worked with the Republican minority, if at all. Your unconditional support of the president and the entire executive branch of government; the endless money he got from Silicon Valley in his home state of California; and the adoring bleats of the fawning journalists were philosophically in tune with Pelosi’s agenda; all of this allowed him to win the absolute loyalty of his fellow Democrats, regardless of how they personally felt about his radical left agenda.
When she tore up President Trump’s State of the Union address, she embarrassed herself, her Party, Congress, and the nation. It was a shameful act.
The Speaker of the House, the third-highest-ranking official in the country, must be the Speaker of the entire House, not just their respective Party. Certainly the Speaker is a partisan, but partisanship must be led by majority and minority leaders.
The Republicans have retaken control of the House, albeit with an incredibly slim majority. My message to them is simply: ‘Don’t repeat the mistakes of your predecessors!’
The Speaker doesn’t just represent his party; but he or she represents Congress and the nation. The speaker owes it to the country to provide dignity and respect to the House.
Of course, Ms. Pelosi wasn’t the only speaker to abuse the system in recent years, but she refined her abuse into an art form.
Chairman Hastert may have started the process when he imposed the ‘Hastert Rule’ which required a majority vote of the Republican conference before allowing committee legislation to proceed to the Rules Committee and/or the House Floor.
Much later, under Chairman Boehner, the ‘Freedom Caucus’, a group of about 40 members strong, required an even higher percentage of consent from its members before any of them would vote on specific legislation.
Many of them refused to vote on “must-have” annual appropriations bills, meaning spokesmen Boehner and Ryan had no choice but to bargain with Democrats for votes to pass funding for the cost of government, including defense.
The process became so cumbersome for leaders of both parties that appropriations bills became too difficult to pass, so action was reserved until the last minute.
Instead of passing smaller, more manageable bills in the historically accepted process, they began to combine the 12 appropriations bills into single ‘Omnibus’ bills in packages of thousands of indecipherable pages.
Failing that, continuous resolutions or ‘CR’s’ became the frequent alternative. CRs are the worst of all options because they simply repeat what was done the year before, adding new spending authority to offset inflation without sufficient oversight, attention, or change to detail, regardless of waste or genuine need.
Both omnibus and CR bills serve to disenfranchise individual members and deny their constituents participation in the legislative process.
Bob Livingston represented Louisiana’s 1st District for 24 years.
The American legislative process is broken. It can be fixed, but only the leaders of both sides work together to make it happen.
Philosophical positions need not be abandoned, but they must be contained within a process easily envisioned by the principal author of our Constitution, James Madison.
Few current members of Congress understand the term ‘Regular Order’. But when I got into Congress under President Tip O’Neill, regular order meant something, and it worked. Members of both parties were certainly partisan, but the system restrained them from their worst excesses.
Under the ‘regular order’, the committee chair along with his minority-ranking members guide legislation through the Rules Committee to the House Floor. They are not dictated by the Speaker or by any member of the leadership. The process allows for public hearings, debate, consensus, and accommodations for minority voice.
It is imperative that changes be made and that members take pride in having been elected to one of the most important institutions in human history. The United States House of Representatives deserves no less.