She was a Democratic Member of Congress from New York, and for a couple of years, Chair of the Rules Committee. The Rules Committee in the House of Representatives matters a lot. It is the instrument by which the majority party in the House controls procedure, and hence, controls outcomes. How? Largely by restricting amendments, and such. What they do is way more complicated, but the simplest and clearest demonstration of what they do is determine who gets to offer what amendments to which bills when bills reach the floor of the House.
What's that, you say? You have an amendment you'd like to offer to this bill? Too fuckin' bad. The Rules Committee says no. No amendment for you. The probability of them saying that is far higher if you are in the minority party, obviously, and that's kind of the point.
They can get creative when there are multiple versions of a bill, structure the order of votes, and take advantage of what Richard McKelvey called the "chaos theorem." Not chaos theory, and no, this has nothing to do with yesterday's post. The short version of McKelvey's observation is that, when you have a bunch of people with complex preferences, you can get any outcome you want by constructing a sequence of votes in the right order.
The thing about doing so is that the job is haaard. You have to understand the arcane procedures of the House, know how to use the information provided by your party whip, and be pretty damned slick about what you do. Chairing the Rules Committee, effectively, is among the more difficult and important jobs in Congress. I give a lot of credit to Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, and bash the idiots trying to unseat her as harshly as I bash the dipshits who removed Boehner (another truly great Speaker), but you know who also deserves a lot of credit for what the Democrats managed to pass in 2009 and 2010? Louise Slaughter. She chaired the Rules Committee. It is a difficult job.
And one that you never see, unless, oh, I don't know, you read Roll Call every damned day, like I do. And even then, there's a bunch of reading between the lines because so much of the job is about prevention rather than action.
Today's news? McCabe got fired. Why? Because Donald Trump is a corrupt piece of fucking shit. Stormy Daniels may have been physically threatened by Trump or his people. Why? Same reason. But you know what? We already knew the basic stories there, and you know what else?
Trump will pay no price whatsoever for anything. He never has, and he never will, because he has an entire political party devoted solely to his protection. Trump goes down, the GOP goes down. As I keep writing, there is an electoral bomb strapped to Trump and the entire Republican Party is chained to him. So, they protect him by declaring all charges against him to be "fake news," attack anyone who criticizes him, and everything gets clouded by the general political norm of declaring partisan disputes to be fights between equivalent positions. Add in Republican congressional opposition to any investigation, much less sanction, and Trump gets away with anything and everything.
No news here.
Amid all of this, though, some aspects of government still continue their "normal" operations. And you don't see them. You never saw Louise Slaughter at work, and she mattered.
