David Skaggs: “I wonder if we might send the Sergeant at Arms out around the House buildings to search for conservatives. We seem to…”

“I wonder if we might send the Sergeant at Arms out around the House buildings to search for conservatives. We seem to have lost our conservative grounding in this Congress, after all of the protests that we have heard over the last, almost 3 years, about the importance of returning power to the States, about mistrust of Federal judicial activism and on and on and on. Here we have this piece of legislation that will run exactly counter to the presumed doctrine of the majority party, inviting judicial activism by the Federal courts, interposing Federal intervention as the first resort rather than the last. I am absolutely bewildered by this. I wonder whether the subtitle of this legislation ought to make some reference to the fact that Lewis Carol has been installed as honorary chairperson of the Committee on the Judiciary. This bill certainly represents Congress through the looking glass, in which all notions of what had been true and upright have been turned on their heads. And we are now presented with this proposal from the majority that really makes a mockery of what we thought they stood for, and what really most of us stand for, in terms of local control, the determination of local matters of land use by the authorities that are most competent to deal with the issue.”