Vice Presidential Debate

So this debate was completley different from the Presidential Debate, but that was to be expected. Edwards met and surpassed his "legitimacy test" and VP Cheney didn't drop an F-Bomb. Some quotes, Cheney rebuttals, and a lengthy post after the break.

Some interesting quotes from Senator Edwards:

"He voted against Head Start."
"He voted against banning plastic weapons that can pass through medical detectors."
"He voted against 'Meals on Wheels' for Seniors."
"He voted against a holiday for Martin Luther King."
"He voted against a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela."

Now let's drop some Cheney here:

In my capacity as vice president, I am the president of the senate, the presiding officer, I'm in the senate most tuesdays in session. The first time I met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.

What was that Mr. Vice President? You never met the Senator until tonight? Was that a lie? Or was that a Cheney-ism? Via TalkLeft and the The Asheville Citizen-Times:

January 08, 2003 WASHINGTON -- Republican Elizabeth Dole, sworn in as North Carolina's newest senator Tuesday, pledged to work with lawmakers of both parties to strengthen national defense, boost the economy, reform health care and address farming issues crucial to North Carolinians. Dole had her grandmother's Bible as she was sworn in on the Senate floor. She raised her right hand and took the oath administered by Vice President Dick Cheney, the Senate president.

Per Senate tradition, Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., escorted her. Her husband, former Senate majority leader and GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole, also was by her side.

emphasis mine (via Lexis-Nexis) January 8, 2003 Wednesday Final Edition, Pg. 1A, HEADLINE: Dole to focus on national security, jobs, health care, BYLINE: Raju Chebium, STAFF WRITER

Hmm... did you mean, never met on playground, Mr. Vice President?

Did anyone notice that at the end of the debate, Senator Edwards thanked thanked Vice PResident Cheney for a good debate, and Cheney just turned away. What class we have in our sitting VP. I would expect that of 5th graders, but again, at least Cheney didn't drop F-Bombs.

What the hell was with Cheney's false remorse for not reaching to the other side of the aisle in Congress and blaming it on Democrats? Please. Republicans have been abusing the Rules Committee, Conference Committees, and restricting debate on issues fundamental to our country. Notice why there aren't any grand speeches these days from Congress? It isn't that the media isn't covering it, because we all know that the media loves arguments when it involves members of Congress, it is because it just isn't happening anymore. Because Republican lawmakers are abusing the levers of power in Congress to an extent that Tip O'Neil would only have dreamt about. Read Boston Globe's article entitled Back-room dealing a Capitol trend: GOP flexing its majority power:

With one party controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, and having little fear of retaliation by the opposing party, the House leadership is changing the way laws are made in America, favoring secrecy and speed over open debate and negotiation.
...

  • The House Rules Committee, which is meant to tweak the language in bills that come out of committee, sometimes rewrites key passages of legislation approved by other committees, then forbids members from changing the bills on the floor. Only five times this year were House members allowed to amend policy bills on the floor, and only 15 percent of bills this year were open to amendment. For the entire 108th Congress, just 28 percent of total bills have been open to amendment -- barely more than half of what Democrats allowed in their last session in power in 1993-94. Further, the Rules Committee has blocked floor votes on legislation opposed by the Bush administration but supported by a majority of the House. For example, a bill to extend benefits to the long-term unemployed has been kept off the House floor despite what backers say is the support of a bipartisan majority.

  • The Rules Committee commonly holds sessions late at night or in the wee hours of the morning, earning the nickname "the Dracula Congress" by critical Democrats and keeping some lawmakers quite literally in the dark about the legislation put before them. On the Patient's Bill of Rights legislation in 2001, for example, the Rules Committee made a one-word change in the middle of the night that drastically limited the liability of HMOs that deny coverage to their patients. The measure was hustled through the House hours later, with few lawmakers aware of the change.

  • Congressional conference committees, charged with reconciling differences between House- and Senate-passed versions of the same legislation, have become dramatically more powerful in shaping bills. The panels, made up of a small group of lawmakers appointed by leaders in both parties, added a record 3,407 "pork barrel" projects to appropriations bills for this year's federal budget, items that were never debated or voted on beforehand by the House and Senate and whose congressional patrons are kept secret. This compares to just 47 projects added in conference committee in 1994, the last year of Democratic control.

  • Bills are increasingly crafted behind closed doors, and on two major pieces of legislation -- the Medicare and energy bills -- few Democrats were allowed into the critical conference committee meetings, sessions that historically have been bipartisan. The energy bill -- a sweeping package meant to lay out a national energy policy -- started in closed-door meetings held by Vice President Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force and was written in private sessions on Capitol Hill that excluded all Democrats. On the Medicare negotiations, only two Democrats -- both already supportive of the bill -- were included.

  • The amount of time spent openly debating bills has dropped dramatically, and lawmakers are further hamstrung by an abbreviated schedule that gives them little time to fully examine a bill before voting on it. The House typically holds no votes until Tuesday evenings -- and then usually on noncontroversial items such as the renaming of post offices -- then adjourns for the week by Thursday afternoon. The Iraq war resolution was debated just two days in 2002; the defense authorization bill, which customarily undergoes weeks of floor discussion, was debated and voted on this year in two days.

    Lawmakers say they are still finding items in the Medicare package that passed last winter that they find objectionable, such as the financial penalty on seniors who wait to sign up for the Medicare prescription drug plan.

    "There was no way that every member of Congress could hold up their right hand and say, `I read every page of that bill before the vote,' " said Nita Lowey, a New York Democrat, noting that members had just one day to examine the 400-plus-page bill before voting on a law that would change health-care allotments across the country.

  • The dearth of debate and open dealing in the House has given a crucial advantage to a select group of industry lobbyists who are personally close to decision-makers in Congress. A Globe study of lobbying showed that on the Medicare and energy bills, businesses and other groups who reported lobbying on the two measures spent a staggering $799,091,391 in efforts to influence lawmakers, frequently employing former members of Congress, former staff members, and relatives of lawmakers to lobby on the bills.

Everyone should go and read the article. And yes, Democrats under O'Neil did use their power to the fullest in the 80's, but this is a historic low for Congress. When you control both branches of Congress and the Executive, there is no fear of reprisals from the other party, and you can do what you want. Why do you think that these last few weeks, and for the remainder of the session of Congress, the Republican leadership is more interested in brining up votes on bills that have no possibility of passing, that are only political retribution to Democrats? I'm sorry, I realize that Congress has been a historically a mess, but this Congress under the Republican leadership is as vengeful as the Congress during Radical Reconstruction.

UPDATE
If you have Andrew Sullivan saying you got killed, then man:

Boy was I ever wrong. If last Thursday night's debate was an assisted suicide for president Bush, this debate - just concluded - was a car wreck. And Cheney was road-kill. There were times when it was so overwhelming a debate victory for Edwards that I had to look away. I have to do C-SPAN now, but stay tuned for more post-debate blogging in a little while.

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