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Washington » Republicans were incensed.
The House was about to vote on a massive energy bill that would set limits on carbon emissions and add what GOP critics say would be a major consumer tax. But a copy of the final bill was nowhere to be found.
"Madam speaker, this would be humorous if it weren't so doggone sad," Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., declared from the well of the House.
Technically, the bill was there: hundreds of pages in two piles that had yet to be meshed together to allow members to see the final changes. Within hours of the GOP complaint, while the bill was still being collated, the House passed the measure 219-212.
To many Republicans, that June 26 energy policy legislation will be remembered as the 1,400-page bill that broke the camel's back.
After Democratic promises to run the most open and transparent Congress in history, Republicans say they are stunned by the number of closed-off debates over legislation, including spending bills, and the lack of time to actually see, let alone read, measures before the House votes.
The complaint may come as odd from the party that clamped a vice-like grip on procedure when it controlled the House, stretching a 15-minute vote into three hours, closing a record number of debates, and operating late-night Rules Committee hearings.
Still, Rep. Rob Bishop, a Utah Republican who was part of the Rules Committee
"With many of these things, we did it -- we just didn't do it to this degree and regularity," Bishop complains. The Democrats "are taking the sins of the past and exacerbating them."
But Congress is moving forward in some ways to open up:
-- Speaker Nancy Pelosi has ordered that individual office expenses be posted online instead of published in tiny print in books available only in a few places;
-- The Senate is looking into forcing its members to file campaign expense reports in an electronic form to make them more easily searchable by the public;
-- And several members of Congress are pushing legislation to force bills to be posted online for 72 hours before they can officially be voted on.
"If each of these three initiatives pass, it would represent dramatic change," says Ellen Miller, executive director and co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation, which seeks transparency in government. "But Congress is hidebound in tradition and there's a huge cultural resistance to making more data and information more open and accessible."
On the disappointing side, Miller says, Congress continues to rush through bills before anyone has had a chance to read them. That happened with the cap-and-trade measure, and previously on the massive stimulus project.
Still, Democrats say they are making headway.
On the energy-bill debate, Democratic aides say the bulk of the legislation had been aired for weeks before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and that's aside from the fact the proposal had been around for more than a year. The bill, and the companion 300-page manager's amendment, were available online as well.
House Rules Committee spokesman Vince Morris says that Democrats felt the bill needed to be pushed through because of the urgency of the climate change threat.
"Nothing in Washington happens quickly," Morris says. So, "To the extent that we can move a history-making bill along with urgency and get something done about climate change, we're gonna do it every time."
Democrats also contend that the Republicans forced them into shutting down the open process for a spending bill for the departments of Commerce, Justice and State. When the bill initially came up, GOP members tossed up hundreds of amendments and forced a revote on dozens of measures, breaking an all-time record on the number of votes in one day.
In some ways, arguments about process are the minority party's best weapon.
"This is just frustration on their part," Morris says. "It's always a bummer to be in the minority and Republicans take out that frustration by complaining about the process or about relatively obscure technical points."
Norm Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says there has been some improvement in the way Congress operates.
"There's a little more openness there," Ornstein says. "But you can't say that you've seen a significant return to the regular order at this point. What you've got at this point is one of the minority talking points over the recess is to say that they're worse than we were. And that's a stretch."
What's more accurate, he says, is that Democrats are closing off debates because Republicans are using every tactic imaginable to gum up the process and ensure that Democrats fail.
"The majority has more of the onus here" on keeping the process open, Ornstein says. "You also have to find some responsibility on the part of the minority. We're not getting enough from either side."
