Obama and the Vampire Congress

Meet the Beltway bloodsuckers. They
convene in the dead of night, when most ordinary mortals
have left work and let their guard down or are lying
asleep in bed. Pale-faced and insatiable, the nocturnal
thieves do their nefarious business in backrooms and
secret chambers. Their primary victims? Taxpayers, the
free market and deliberative democracy.

Democratic leaders have been
promising the most ethical, transparent, open and
engaged administration for years. Instead, they have
delivered a bleak and creepy legislative environment
that could double as a
"Twilight" movie set.

Skulking Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid rammed the government health care takeover
package through under the cover of darkness before

Thanksgiving and

Christmas. House Democratic leaders forbade debate
on all but one amendment not authored by themselves. The
Senate Finance Committee killed a GOP amendment that
would have required Demcare to be available online for
72 hours before the committee voted. Reid and his

Volterra-style henchmen cut last-minute
cash-for-cloture deals behind closed doors.

And now House and Senate Democratic
leaders are reportedly preparing to cut dissenters out
of the reconciliation process by bypassing the formal
conference committee.

In Hill parlance, this

legislative shortcut is called
"ping-ponging."
A better game analogy: dodgeball. With mounting
opposition from both conservative Republicans and
progressive Democrats, President Obama`s water-carriers
must use every trick in the book to speed the final
merging and passage of the bill before the end of the
month.

The hypocrisy reeks stronger than
rotting garlic. In

2006, House Democrats

asserted that
"House-Senate conferences are a critical part of the
deliberative process because they produce the final
legislative product that will become the law of the
land." That same year,

Reid railed on the Senate floor against informal
deal-making that circumvented the conference committee
process—and he attacked the use of manager`s amendments
to

avoid public scrutiny:

"Of course, nobody can see the manager`s amendment. It is composed of
over 40 amendments. How could anyone vote for a piece of
legislation such as that—a manager`s amendment with 42
separate amendments? Now, these amendments were not put
in a conference committee. People complain about that.
But at least in a conference committee, you have people
working together, sticking things in. … Here, you have
one person making a decision as to what is going to be
in the manager`s amendment. There is no way to know what
is in it."

But four years later, it was Reid
who snuck his 383-page manager`s amendment—stuffed with
payoffs, special breaks and concessions on health
care—into the Senate hopper on the Saturday before
Christmas break. Four years later, it is Reid stifling
the open, collaborative conference committee process he
so fiercely championed.

Where`s Barack Obama? As a
candidate, he promised repeatedly to broadcast
legislative negotiations on C-SPAN
"so that the American people can see what the choices are" and

"so that the public will be part of the conversation and will see the
choices that are being made." But the most
transparent presidential administration ever is
shrugging its shoulders. On Tuesday, White House press
secretary Robert Gibbs pooh-poohed C-SPAN`s request to
allow electronic media coverage of the Demcare
negotiations.

Instead,

Gibbs thinks Americans should be grateful for what
they got last month:
"The Senate did a
lot of their voting at 1:00 and 2:00 in the morning on
C-SPAN. … And I think if you watched that debate—I don`t
know—I wasn`t up at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning for a
lot of those votes, but I think if the American public
had watched … you`d have seen quite a bit of public
hearing and public airing." And if you missed the
middle-of-the-night broadcasts, tough noogies.

Team Obama`s contempt for
meaningful transparency has been on display from Day
One. A year ago this month, Obama broke his vaunted open
government pledge with the very first bill he signed
into law. On Jan. 29, 2009, the White House boasted that
the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act had been posted online
for review. Except: Obama had already signed it—in
violation of his
"sunlight before signing" pledge to post
legislation for public comment on the White House
website five days before he sealed any deal.

From the stimulus to the health
care takeover to holiday bailouts for bankrupt financial
behemoths Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it`s been all
backrooms and blackouts ever since. The Prince of
Darkness at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is perfectly happy
with his Vampire Congress. Wraiths of a sunshine-evading
feather flock together.

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Michelle Malkin

[email
her]
is the author of


Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists,
Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our
Shores.
Click


here
for Peter Brimelow`s review. Click



here
for Michelle Malkin`s website. Michelle Malkin
is also author of




Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild
and the just-released Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies.