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originally posted by: elementalgrove
This is hands down one of the biggest issues that people should be paying attention to.
Good on these protestors for pointing out the hypocrisy of these scumbag senators selling out the people of this country and allowing Monsatan to continue poisoning us and our land.
It is remarkable how deceitful these people can be, put the damn label on the food, it is that simple, what are they afraid of!?
The political process used to pass Part D was the worst abuse of the legislative process I have seen during my 20 years in Congress. In the months before its passage, a few powerful Republican leaders worked to undermine conscientious reform proposals. In early 2003, while the House bill was being drafted, Democrats and Republicans authored 59 sensible amendments to it. At the behest of the Republican leadership, however, the House Committee on Rules rejected all but one, preventing them from being debated by Congress. Many of those amendments — among them, one requiring the administration to use beneficiaries' collective purchasing power to negotiate lower prices and one allowing Americans to import cheaper drugs from Canada — would have made the legislation far more effective and probably would have received bipartisan support, had they been allowed onto the floor.
Next, the conference process, whereby the House and Senate versions of legislation are reconciled, was fundamentally corrupted and kept almost entirely secret by senior Republicans. Democrats on the conference committee were excluded from deliberations, to the point of being physically barred from the conference room on one occasion. The pharmaceutical industry, however, was invited in.
When the conference report was brought to the House for a vote, members were given less than one day to read the 850-page bill, a violation of House rules. When the vote was called at almost 3 a.m., voting Democrats stood unanimously with 22 Republicans in opposing the legislation. Had the vote been gaveled down in the customary 15 minutes, the bill would not have passed. So the Republican leadership held the vote open for a record three hours while attempting to change the outcome — through intimidation and other tactics that, again, violated House rules. Finding itself with a narrow lead at 5:53 a.m., the Republican leadership immediately brought the vote to a close.
Many abuses undoubtedly took place that night. Representative Nick Smith (R-Mich.) later revealed what may have been the worst: that former Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Representative Candice Miller (R-Mich.) tried to bribe him with political favors to change his vote — an infraction for which the House Ethics Committee later admonished them.