Saturday, February 14, 2009

What Exactly Was That That Happened at the First time in 50 years Televised Meeting of the House-Senate Appropriations Committee?

I'm new at this, so I may not have got it all right, but as a watcher of the actual televising Wednesday night of the House-Senate Appropriations Committee meeting, this is what I noted:


Senator Inouye chaired the meeting, at some point announcing, "There will be no amendments presented in this meeting." I thought this was curious, because I had understood that the purpose of the meeting was for selected Republicans and Democrats to "tweak" the bill that had just been passed by the House. This tweaking, I thought, was to be accomplished through debate and amendments to the House bill, so that the resulting bill out of Appropriations could be a compromise one.

What struck me as odd was that most of the attendees were Republicans Where was an equal number of of Democrats? And why were amendments not allowed? Don't those who show up get to sway the vote?

A few days later, a FOX news reporter mentioned that on Wednesday, while Republicans showed up to debate and amend, the Democrats never showed. They were "holed up" behind closed doors.

So apparently a House-Senate Appropriations Committee meeting never was, dispite the fact that something loosely described as one was televised.

So much for transparency.

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