It's mid-November, not long after the midterm Congressional election. The sun is shining in Fairport, but it's cold out, the first real cold snap to threaten the long Indian summer.
the shingles.
But she's about to head one of the most powerful committees in the House of Representatives. So despite her lingering illness, she's moving around the house, fixing sandwiches, answering her persistent BlackBerry, and keeping one eye on a television set tuned to CNN. All the while, she manages to keep up a brisk conversation.
Come January, Slaughter will chair the House of Representatives' Committee on Rules. You could be forgiven for wondering what the Rules Committee is, and the committee's own web site isn't much help. Its home page boasts, front and center, a list of "Recent Actions" including, last week, this gem:
"Text of H.
R. 6346 --- To extend certain trade preference programs, to authorize the extension of nondiscriminatory treatment (normal trade relations treatment) to the products of Vietnam, to the trade laws, and for other purposes."
But the Rules Committee doesn't debate policy.
So what the committee did with H.R. 6346 had nothing to do Vietnam or trade.
What it did was to set a one-hour limit on debate and to decide that amendments couldn't be added to the bill on the floor of the House.
about how a law can be considered --- whether amendments can be added, how long Committee on Rules does.
It's like C-SPAN on Quaaludes.
Policy for a policy wonk's wonk. But Slaughter is happy wading into the arcana of parliamentary procedure on our behalf. She not only talks about the significance of the Rules Committee in today's world, but she also wants to impart her own fondness for the institution, starting with its history.
It was founded, she explains, in 1787.
House," she says. "It was decided by the founding fathers that there needed to the floor to be voted on.
"
She details how John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson got the Virginia, one Howard Smith, who was blocking their civil-rights legislation.
handful of "exclusive committees" (you can't sit on Rules and, say, the Agriculture Committee), when, perhaps, catching a glimpse of the glaze forming on this reporter's eyeballs, she interrupts herself.
"It's esoteric as all get-out," she says, and then quickly adds: "But it's critically important. It's always called 'the powerful Rules Committee.'"
That power, though, has eroded under the presidency of George Bush.
Or rather, says Slaughter, it's been ceded to the president without much of a fight.
"It's lost a lot of power, as everything has under the Republicans," she says. "They've given away most of their own power to George Bush.
We are in the process of bringing back some people from the past who served on Rules and were really good at it, and seeing how we can restore it to its former glory."
regain their authority, they'll need to put their own houses in order. That begins at the start of the term, when each house sets the rules its members must abide by.
Because she's chair of the Rules Committee, Slaughter will be in charge of this unglamorous but important job. If anything, it'll be more important this time around, given how prominently corruption scandals figured into the Democrats' sweep of both houses of Congress.
To prove they're serious about reform, the Dems will have to enact rules in the opening sessions of Congress that are tough, credible, and enforceable.
Does the party have the political will to adopt tough reform? In the House of Representatives, the answer will come in the form of the rules package that Slaughter will introduce at the session's opening. That means that Slaughter is cast in the role of Nancy Pelosi's enforcer.
She'll have her work cut out for her.
month) has been among the tawdriest in recent memory. One of its members, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, is in jail for accepting lavish bribes.
News RSS