csua.org/u/d0q -> www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7539869?rnd=1123803123440&has-player=true
Bernie Sanders and staff Four Amendments & a Funeral A month inside the house of horrors that is Congress By MATT TAIBBI It was a fairy-tale political season for George W Bush, and it seemed li ke no one in the world noticed. Amid bombs in London, bloodshed in Iraq, a missing blonde in Aruba and a scandal curling up on the doorstep of K arl Rove, Bush's Republican Party quietly celebrated a massacre on Capit ol Hill. Two of the most long-awaited legislative wet dreams of the Wash ington Insiders Club -- an energy bill and a much-delayed highway bill - - breezed into law. One mildly nervous evening was all it took to pass t hrough the House the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), for years now a primary strategic focus of the battle-in-Seattle activist sc ene. And accompanied by scarcely a whimper from the Democratic oppositio n, a second version of the notorious USA Patriot Act passed triumphantly through both houses of Congress, with most of the law being made perman ent this time. Bush's summer bills were extraordinary pieces of legislation, broad in sc ope, transparently brazen and audaciously indulgent. The highway bill set new standards for monstrous and indefe nsibly wasteful spending, with Congress allocating $100,000 for a single traffic light in Canoga Park, California, and $223 million for the cons truction of a bridge linking the mainland an Alaskan island with a popul ation of just fifty. It was a veritable bonfire of public money, and it raged with all the bri lliance of an Alabama book-burning. And what fueled it all were the litt le details you never heard about. By the time the newspapers reduced this Tolstoyan monster to the s ize of a single headline announcing its passage, only a very few America ns understood that it was an ambitious giveaway to energy interests. But the drama of the legislative process is never in the broad strokes but in the bloody skirmishes and power plays that happen behind the scenes. To understand the breadth of Bush's summer sweep, you had to watch the ha nd-fighting at close range. You had to watch opposition gambits die slow deaths in afternoon committee hearings, listen as members fell on their swords in exchange for favors and be there to see hordes of lobbyists r ush in to reverse key votes at the last minute. All of these things I di d -- with the help of a tour guide. Sanders is a tall, angular man with a messy head of gull-white hair and a circa-1977 set of big-framed eyeglasses. Minus the austere congressiona l office, you might mistake him for a physics professor or a journalist of the Jimmy Breslin school. Vermont's sole representative in the House, Sanders is expected to become the first Independent ever elected to the US Senate next year. He is something of a cause celebre on both the left and right these days, with each side overreacting to varying degrees to the idea of a self-describ ed "democratic socialist" coming so near to a seat in the upper house. Some months before, a Sanders aide had tried to sell me on a story about his boss, but over lunch we ended up talking about Congress itself. Like a lot of people who have worked on the Hill a little too long, the aide had a strange look in his eyes -- the desperate look of a man who's bee n marooned on a remote island, subsisting on bugs and abalone for years on end. You worry that he might grab your lapel in frustration at any mo ment. " Some time later I came back to the aide and told him that a standard camp aign-season political profile was something I probably couldn't do, but if Sanders would be willing to give me an insider's guided tour of the h orrors of Congress, I'd be interested. "Like an evil, adult version of Schoolhouse Rock," I said. The aide laughed and explained that the best time for me to go would be j ust before the summer recess, a period when Congress rushes to pass a nu mber of appropriations bills. I thought Sanders would be an ideal subject for a variety of reasons, but mainly for his Independent status. For all the fuss over his "socialist " tag, Sanders is really a classic populist outsider. The mere fact that Sanders signed off on the idea of serving as my guide says a lot about his attitude toward government in general: He wants people to see exactl y what he's up against. I had no way of knowing that Sanders would be a perfect subject for anoth er, more compelling reason. In the first few weeks of my stay in Washing ton, Sanders introduced and passed, against very long odds, three import ant amendments. A fourth very nearly made it and would have passed had i t gone to a vote. During this time, Sanders took on powerful adversaries , including Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse, the Export-Import Bank and th e Bush administration. And by using the basic tools of democracy -- floo r votes on clearly posed questions, with the aid of painstakingly built coalitions of allies from both sides of the aisle -- he, a lone Independ ent, beat them all. It was an impressive run, with some in his office calling it the best win ning streak of his career. By my last week in Washington, all of his victories had been rolled back, each carefully nurtured amendment perishing in the grossly corrupt and absurd vortex of political dysfunction that is today's US Congress. Wh at began as a tale of political valor ended as a grotesque object lesson in the ugly realities of American politics -- the pitfalls of digging f or hope in a shit mountain. Amendment 1 At 2 pm on Wednesday, July 20th, Sanders leaves his office in the Raybu rn Building and heads down a tunnel passageway to the Capitol, en route to a Rules Committee hearing. "People have this impression that you can raise any amendment you want," he says. Amendments occupy a great deal of most legislators' time, particularly th ose lawmakers in the minority. Members of Congress do author major bills , but more commonly they make minor adjustments to the bigger bills. Rat her than write their own anti-terrorism bill, for instance, lawmakers wi ll try to amend the Patriot Act, either by creating a new clause in the law or expanding or limiting some existing provision. The bill that ulti mately becomes law is an aggregate of the original legislation and all t he amendments offered and passed by all the different congresspersons al ong the way. Sanders is the amendment king of the current House of Representatives. Si nce the Republicans took over Congress in 1995, no other lawmaker -- not Tom DeLay, not Nancy Pelosi -- has passed more roll-call amendments (am endments that actually went to a vote on the floor) than Bernie Sanders. He accomplishes this on the one hand by being relentlessly active, and on the other by using his status as an Independent to form left-right co alitions. On this particular day, Sanders carries with him an amendment to Section 215 of the second version of the Patriot Act, which is due to go to the House floor for a reauthorization vote the next day. Unlike many such me asures, which are often arcane and shrouded in minutiae, the Sanders ame ndment is simple, a proposed rollback of one of the Patriot Act's most e gregious powers: Section 215 allows law enforcement to conduct broad sea rches of ordinary citizens -- even those not suspected of ties to terror ism -- without any judicial oversight at all. To a civil libertarian lik e Sanders, it is probably a gross insult that at as late a date as the y ear 2005 he still has to spend his time defending a concept like probabl e cause before an ostensibly enlightened legislature. But the legislatio n itself will prove not half as insulting as the roadblocks he must over come to force a vote on the issue. The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world's outstanding bureauc ratic abomination -- a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish. The official function of the committee is to decide which bills and amendments will be voted on by Congress and also to schedule the parameters of debate. If Rules votes against your amendment, your amendment dies. If you control the Rules Committe...
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