Burning Down the House

I've written about the subject before, but the Democrats on the House Rules committee have just released a 147-page documentation of the ways Rethuglicans manipulated the rules of the 108th Congress to serve their own ends. They've titled it 'The Death of Deliberative Democracy' and one could wish that was an exaggeration.

If you're like me, you grew up hearing stories about how the sham parliaments in places like the USSR or Latin America were used to provide the figleaf of 'democratic participation', when any honest person could see that it was bogus. The so-called legislatures merely rubber-stamped the proposals of the Kremlin, or the ruling junta. There was no real deliberation, no true freedom or democracy. When I was a boy, this was what made those countries "bad". Fighting against such things was, to us grade-schoolers, the point of the Cold War.

Now that we have our very own banana republic, (and I don't mean the clothing store) I encourage you to read the report itself(pdf). If you're like me, it'll take a while, though. I kept seeing red, and having to take a break.