"The middle finger approach to governing"

Nancy Pelosi and Louise Slaughter issued a report today on Republican abuses in Congress. Since I'm down with the sickness, I thought I might print it out and read it. If you want to do it yourself, here's the PDF.

Yglesias has a chart from the report already. That's why he's the tops!

*UPDATE* The whole thing makes Republicans seem very draconian and makes David Dreier (R-CA) seem like a hypocrite.

Here's my fav part so far (pg 39-40)

Republican leadership regularly jammed conference reports on major legislation totaling hundreds and hundreds of pages through the Rules Committee and the House in a matter of hours. Members interested in the contents of the conference report on the dividend tax bill, for example, had 40 seconds to read each page of the 299-page conference report before they were required to vote on it. Members interested in the FY 04 Defense authorization or FY 04 Omnibus bills would have had to have perused the conference report at a three-pages-a-minute rate between the time the rule was reported and the final vote. Because it was just not possible to read through the hundreds of pages of complex statutory language in the time they were given, Members found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to vote up-or-down on legislation that was not familiar to them.

(snip)

Republican leaders had slipped into the Homeland Security conference report at the end of the 107th Congress that protected Eli Lilly and a number of other pharmaceutical companies from civil liability for their production of the vaccine preservative Thimerosal. Health-care advocates and editorial pages around the country justifiably asked what this provision had to do with homeland security and how it had been inserted at the last minute into the bill.

(snip)

House Republicans were obviously not chastened by this experience. The Energy Bill conference (H.R. 6), which excluded from its meetings even the House Democratic conferees who had voted for the bill, added scores of obscure provisions that had not appeared in the House or Senate bills, including the embarrassing “greenbonds initiative,” which turned out to be a subsidy to build a Hooters restaurant in Shreveport, Louisiana. Dubbed by Senator McCain as the “Hooters and Polluters” bill and widely criticized by the media and a broad range of government-waste groups, this conference report became the textbook example in the 108th Congress of an unaccountable conference process run amuck.