Mule Train Mail: Dick Kaiser “Bushies Allowed to Kill Election Reform for Another Year”

On
April 15, as millions of Americans made a commitment to fulfill their
obligation to fund the commonwealth and its imperialistic ways, the
House of Representatives all but guaranteed that election integrity in
November this year will be a crap-shoot at best.

The story begins full of good news…

At
4pm Empire time, the House voted on HR 5036, the Emergency Election
Assistance for Secure Elections Act, providing for paper ballots
throughout the country. Already, the bill had been voted unanimously out of the House Administration Committee, chaired by Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), for a full House vote.  With strong bi-partisan support, the Majority Leader Steny Hoyer put the measure on the "suspension" calendar which requires a 2/3’s "aye" vote for passage.

So far so good, right?

But
just prior to the vote, the White House signaled to Bush supporters in
the House to vote “nay” on the bill, and to real democracy. Despite
this maneuver, Hoyer, who is responsible for 1) how legislation is
brought to the floor and 2) assessing vote strength for each bill
headed for a vote, forged ahead on the fast, but risky, track,
apparently oblivious to the control Bush still has among House
Republicans.

Result?

The bill failed miserably to achieve the two-thirds
threshold, 239-178, and the initiative to support paper ballots was stalled, possibly until the next Congress!

As
expected, author of the bill Rush Holt (D-NJ) and co-author Robert
Wexler (D-FL) blamed Bush and the Republicans who claimed the
legislation would “cost too much."  But
it is clear that activists need to be cognizant of the botched job of
the leadership of the House Democrats.

Why on earth did Hoyer risk
certain defeat and simply put the bill to a floor vote under regular
business? Now that we know the sorry result, a slower, but surer
approach would have probably saved the day.

Or
was this defeat of the bill not bungling but duplicity at work to
sabotage an imperfect, but helpful, bill? After all, the elections
corporations were fighting this bill, big time. We may need to wait
for some politician’s memoirs to be written to know the answer to that
one.

Who’s
fault this is, readers will need to decide. But the question remains,
“Does Congress have the will to protect the People from the
Perpetrators on Election Day?"