Ready to move on? Good. Me too. We worked hard for the last year-plus for a reason, and our new democratic majority is moving in this week. Remember thinking that a majority in the House and Senate was just unrealistic? Me too.
This diary is your preview into what's going to happen in the next few weeks, as we realize just what we've won. Wittgenstein wrote that "Explanations come to an end somewhere." So does meta. Allow me to show you the way out.
What you can expect from this diary:
- An in depth preview and profile of the incoming Congressional Majority, with a focus on recent news articles on Committee Chairs and their stated goals.
- Summary of the recent work of the Congressional Committees Project, with an explanation of our work on advocating legislative transparency.
- An invitation to interested parties to get involved in collaboratively researching their legislature.
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A majority in the either house of Congress gives democrats far more than the ability to win party line votes. The House functions at the will of the majority, from scheduling action on the House Floor, to Committee Staff, to committee chairs. This is especially true of the House, where the rules are set up to advantage the majority (unlike the Senate, where the rules benefit individual Senators.)
The Washington Post wrote on December 16th about incoming committee chairs and impending investigations. Senator Carl Levin, incoming chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sees the basis for investigation as both pecuniary and moral:
Levin said he also plans inquiries into "documentation of waste and fraud and abuse in the contracting areas" of the military. Aggressive oversight "is not just a budget issue," he said, but at some point "becomes a significant moral issue."
while Murtha will use his Chairmanship of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee to have:
two hearings a day for the first three or four months . . . to find out exactly what happened and who's been responsible for these mistakes.
also,
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said he will use his Judiciary Committee perch to conduct "real oversight" of the FBI and the Justice Department and to delve into "the abuse of billions of taxpayers' dollars sent as development aid to Iraq."
"I am not prepared to accept answers like 'I can't talk about it,' " Leahy said in a recent speech at Georgetown University's law school.
They aren't alone. According to the Nation,
Senators Carl Levin, Joseph Biden and Jay Rockefeller--incoming chairs, respectively, of the Armed Services, Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees--plan an array of hearings. Levin aims to examine the military strategy in Iraq. He might continue his quest to dig up information on the Pentagon cell, created by former Under Secretary Douglas Feith, that funneled misleading intelligence to the White House before the war. Biden, who has proposed turning Iraq into a federation of three autonomous regions, intends to examine alternate policies. Rockefeller is looking to complete the long-delayed Phase II inquiry of the Administration's use (or abuse) of prewar intelligence.
Here's NPR today interviewing Waxman about investigations, and AFP on Biden, Condoleeza Rice, and investigations.
Biden is organizing up to a dozen hearings on the Iraq war, with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called to testify. And Carl Levin, his counterpart on the Senate Armed Forces Committee, has said he plans to summon new Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other officials.
Our enthusiasm for the incoming democratic leadership needn't be focused solely on the long-overdue investigations. (Although the Chairs have also been weighing (Biden) in (Lugar) on (Hagel) the escalation.) We can breathe a sigh of releif as our Congress returns to being an institution of respect and cooperation. This New York Times article brings us news of "Better-Run Congress":
After chafing for years under what they saw as flagrant Republican abuse of Congressional power and procedures, the incoming majority has promised to restore House and Senate practices to those more closely resembling the textbook version of how a bill becomes law: daylight debate, serious amendments and minority party participation.
Pelosi even offered prime office space to Hastert, and has consulted with Boehner about "developing initiatives for the year".
If you aren't pumped by an impending pile of investigations, and a well run house, perhaps you'd be more interested in the environment. A New York Times editorial today discussed a new environmental agenda for the new democratic majority. They scorned Representative Richard Pombo, outgoing chair of the House Resources Committee (being renamed the House Natural Resources Committee) by name, saying he
produced a stream of destructive schemes to open up protected public lands for commercial exploitation, rescind a longstanding moratorium on offshore drilling and undermine the Endangered Species Act.
Being effective environmental leaders is more than failing to cause harm, so let's join in their call to Barbara Boxer (Environment and Public Works Committee) and Jeff Bingaman (Energy and Natural Resources Committee) to enact environmentally responsible public policy.
According to the AP, the democrats also have plans to
establish a dedicated fund to promote renewable energy and conservation, using money from oil companies..."What we'll do is roll back the subsidies to Big Oil and use the resources to invest in a reserve for research in alternative energy," Pelosi, a California Democrat, recently told reporters.
The new leadership means new opportunities for influence on any issue that Congress considers. I'm leaving out a lot. There's more on our News Aggregation Page, where I've been collecting links US legislative news stories since mid-December.
If you'd prefer that more Americans get involved in their political process, or if you would like to stay aware of what's happening with the committees or issues that you care about, you should visit our Congressional Committees Project wiki page. We've been doing a lot more than collecting news links.
After Pelosi's staff contacted me about effective legislative transparency online, we started the recommendations page, to analyze the way that governmental documents are published, distributed, and made public. We've been making steady progress there.
We also have individual wiki pages set up for every congressional committee, to empower individual users and daily kos users to contribute to the wiki pages for each committee. Even pages that have people signed up for them could use help; each committee and subcommittee have more than enough information for even twenty contributors.
I recently wrote that
Politics can become exciting and personally engaging when we succeed in giving regular people meaningful access to what happens in committee, and giving them absorbing community tools for creating a space to watch the aspects of their legislature that interest them specifically. We're attempting to start that space, and working to make the legislature more comprehensible to regular people--moving influence away from lobbyists, and giving lawmakers a greater incentive to make good decisions: the knowledge that those decisions may actually get noticed.
Both the project's success and clout grow in proportion to the participation it garners.
Participating helps to:
- develop awareness about what happens in our legislature,
- send a message to lawmakers that citizens care about government, and what they do will be noticed by constituents and the netroots,
- support everyone who benefits from a transparent government (i.e. everyone) and make transparency reform more likely, and
- create effective advocacy on specific issues (they know we're doing this)
Let me know if you have any questions, or add what you're watching for in the next Congress.