[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 26 (Tuesday, March 8, 2005)]
[House]
[Page H994]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        THE VALUES OF DEMOCRACY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of 
January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized 
during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, something terribly wrong has happened 
in the House of Representatives. I am not talking about, from a 
partisan standpoint, the Republican takeover in 1995, I am not even 
talking about the ascension of Newt Gingrich to the Speakership. What I 
am talking about is the ascension of a new kind of House leaders who 
have run this institution even as former Speaker Gingrich has said, not 
in the fairest possible way, basically in an unprecedented way. We have 
seen things in the House of Representatives in the last couple of years 
that we have literally never seen.
  I want to tell a story and spell out what I mean by this one example. 
Beginning a couple of years ago, at 2:54 a.m. on a Friday in March, the 
House of Representatives cut veterans' benefits by three votes.
  At 2:39 a.m. on a Friday in April, the House slashed education and 
health care benefits by five votes.
  At 1:56 a.m. on a Friday in May, the House passed the Leave No 
Millionaire Behind tax-cut bill by a handful of votes.
  At 2:33 a.m. on a Friday in June, the House passed the first round of 
the Medicare privatization bill by one vote.
  At 12:57 a.m. on a Friday in July, the House eviscerated Head Start 
by one vote.
  After returning from summer recess, at 12:12 a.m. on a Friday in 
October, the House voted $87 billion for Iraq.

                              {time}  1300

  Always on a Thursday night, Friday morning, always in the middle of 
the night, always after the public has turned their TV sets off and 
gone to bed and after most of the media which sits up there has left. 
As I said, always on a Thursday night, because if it gets in the paper 
at all, it would appear then in the Saturday paper, the paper that is 
the least read paper of the week.
  That was just the beginning. Then came the Medicare vote. The final 
round of the Medicare vote took place in November. The debate began at 
midnight on a Friday night in November. The debate took 3 hours. The 
vote began at 3 a.m. Members of Congress are given this card, which we 
stick in a little black box on the House floor to vote. The votes as we 
all know are then recorded electronically. Almost all of us went down 
and cast our votes. Pretty soon after the vote was called at 3 o'clock 
in the morning, the privatization of Medicare, the most important piece 
of domestic legislation that probably anybody in this body had ever 
voted on, at 3 o'clock in the morning the vote began, as I said. We are 
normally given 15 minutes, an extra 5 minutes sometimes, to cast our 
votes. Normally not much more than that.
  At 3:30 the vote was still on. At 4 o'clock, an hour after the vote 
had begun, an hour after most of us voted, the vote was 216 ``yes'' and 
218 ``no.'' At about 4:15, the Republican leadership, the Speaker of 
the House, the majority leader, the chairman of the committee that the 
gentleman from New Jersey and I are on that wrote the bill began to go 
around to recalcitrant Members of their party, Republican Members who 
had voted ``no,'' trying to get them to change their vote. It is now 
4:30. They woke up the President of the United States who from his 
living quarters at the White House got on the phone and began to try to 
lobby the 26 or 27 Members of the Republican side who had voted ``no'' 
on Medicare. They all stood their ground.
  At about 4:45, the Republican leaders surrounded Nick Smith, a 
Republican from Michigan, who told his story on the radio the next day. 
He had already announced his retirement. His son was running for his 
seat. He was told that if he changed his vote, they would come up with 
$100,000 for his son's campaign. When he said no, they said, if you do 
not change your vote, we will come up with $100,000 for your son's 
opponent's campaign.
  Congressman Smith, under great duress with great courage, said, 
Nothing doing. Incidentally, his son later lost the primary. Finally, 
it is 5 o'clock. It is 216-218. It is 5:30. It is 216-218. It is 5:45 
in the morning. It is still 216 ``yes,'' 218 ``no.'' Two hours and 55 
minutes after the vote was called, two Republicans, one from Idaho and 
one from Arizona, came out of the cloakroom, walked down here, picked 
up one of these green cards, you cannot use the plastic electronic card 
that late in the voting, marked the card, changed their vote, 
sheepishly handed it to the House Clerk, the Speaker then gaveled the 
vote closed, and that is how Medicare privatization passed.
  We have seen in this body a new legacy of one-party rule, legislative 
strong-arming and abuses of power never before seen under leaders of 
either party in this House of Representatives, hiding votes from the 
American public under the cover of darkness. We spend plenty of time, 
Mr. Speaker, passing votes on naming post offices in the middle of the 
day and doing important controversial votes at night.
  Mr. Speaker, this abuse of power has to stop.

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