Media Blackout on Congressional Report "Death of Deliberative Democracy"

Yes, Scott Peterson is going to meet his maker and Robert Blake
is going to party hardy, and the president continues to lose more
ground in his quest to destroy Social Security every time he speaks on
behalf of his own program, but any number of stories of import continue
to slip through the cracks of a media that have ceased to take their
public educational role seriously. One such story can be found, rather
surprisingly one must admit, in the release of a fascinating and
insightful new report by the House Rules Committee minority entitled, "Broken Promises: The Death of Deliberative Democracy."

Released on March 8th to almost no public fanfare whatever, the
report pulls no punches in reciting the litany of institutional abuses
perpetrated by Republicans during the 108th Congress. Despite the
potential for some juicy storylines to be found in the various abuses
it outlines, the report has been roundly ignored by the So Called
Liberal Media (SCLM). In many ways, the report picks up on - and
greatly expands - an excellent series of articles published by the
Boston Globe last year, which dealt with Congressional Republicans’ overreach at all levels of government.
The Globe reporters observed that "longtime Congress-watchers say they
have never seen the legislative process so closed to input from
minority-party members, the public, and lobbyists whose agenda is
unsympathetic to GOP leadership goals."

"Broken Promises" offers up specific after specific to support the
Globe’s contention. Over and over, the Republican majority has bent or
broken rules in order to shut the Democratic minority out of the
decision-making process. Sadly, most of the mainstream media (MSM) have
found little time to cover these historic shifts in the workings of
government.

The Washington Post’s Mike Allen has thus far emerged virtually alone among reporters to touch on the report’s findings; his lone story ran last Tuesday, buried on page A13. Reading his piece, and a Reuters story filed the same day,
one might get the impression that the report is little more than
another round of partisan sniping. Would that this were true. The
standard response found in the Post and Reuters reports provided yet
another example of the tendency of the media false equivalence: to
claim that the wholesale changes the Republicans are making are similar
to what the Democrats did when they held power. 

But as The American Prospect’s Sam Rosenfeld notes, this attempt to create a sense of false equivalence does not bear a moment’s scrutiny.

"Let’s recall just a few things that the Democrats did not do, even
during the tenure of their most aggressive and partisan modern speaker,
Jim Wright. They did not sic the Capitol police on a group of the
minority members attempting to confer in an empty room, as the
Republican Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas did in 2003.
They did not exclude non-pliant Republicans from negotiations on
conference reports, as Republicans now do to them as a matter of
course. Their leadership did not make it an explicit rule never to put
bills to a vote that lack support from ’a majority of the majority’ -
that is, a majority of the members of the party in control - as Speaker
Dennis Hastert has done. In 1987, Wright kept the floor vote on a
budget-reconciliation bill open for 10 minutes after the customary 15
minutes had elapsed so he could coax a Democrat to flip his vote;
enraged Republicans clung to that gambit as the crowning example of
Democratic tyranny for years afterward. Such abuses of the clock are
now routine under Republican rule; during the 2003 vote on the Medicare
prescription-drug bill, the leadership kept the voting open for more
than three hours."

In their more pensive moments, Republicans - at least when speaking
anonymously - cannot help but concur. Earlier this year, the Washington
Post quoted a Republican leadership aide as saying, "It took Democrats
40 years to get as arrogant as we have become in 10." While there
are plenty of battles currently being fought over Social Security
privatization, the budget and the president’s judicial nominations, the
fight over granting the minority party a voice touches them all.
Indeed, it lies at the heart of all of these battles. Too bad,
therefore, that virtually all of the media have deemed it unworthy of
mention - much less investigation.

http://www.americanprogress.org/sit...

death of deliberative democracy cliff notes