Barney Frank: “sometimes when a President flies somewhere, part of his trip is charged to his party's political committee because the…”

“sometimes when a President flies somewhere, part of his trip is charged to his party's political committee because the trip is partly governmental and partly political. The expenses for running the House for the next hour ought to be charged to the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, because the purpose of this rule and of other rules we have seen so far is incumbent protection for the Republican Party. What they have done is to shut down democracy within the House. It is democratic in the sense that you get elected to get here, but then it becomes authoritarian. There will be no free speech, there will be no chance to consider tough issues. Why? Not simply because we do not have enough time. We do not work very much around here. We do this to protect Republican incumbents from having to vote on difficult issues. The purpose of the Committee on Rules is to make sure that Republicans can follow an extremely conservative leadership and do things that would be unpopular and then pretend that they had no choice. How does that happen? They vote for rules which prevent them from voting on these issues. They then go in a great act of fakery to their constituents and say, Gee, I would have been with you, but I did not get a chance to vote on that issue, having themselves voted on the procedure which kept the issue off the floor. We cannot vote on important issues in the defense bill; we cannot vote on an alternative unemployment compensation.…”