November 14th: House Judiciary Committee Hearing Thread

[rakewell]

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Shelley Berkley is so awesome that I think I could convince my wife that a divorce would be a good idea so I could marry the esteemed Congresswoman.

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Yeah, she's so awesome that she voted FOR the UIGEA. See http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2006/roll516.xml. Now she wants to "study" whether it should be revisited. Oh yeah, that's political courage, all right.

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She voted against HR 4411, the bill that became UIGEA.

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That's nice. It allows her to say that she voted both ways on the same thing, depending on who she's talking to, which so many politicians love. Wouldn't it be better if she had actually had some integrity and voted against it in its final version, instead of helping to pass it into law? Voting against it once and for it once isn't exactly a model of consistency, integrity, or principle.

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Dude, you are one seriously disturbed tune.

The Safe Ports bill was must pass legislation. She had to vote for it. If Shelley Berkely is not one of our friends, then we are indeed alone in this world with zero hope of any relief.

You obviously have an eight-years-old mindset, able only to see the world in the simplest shades of black and white.

Or maybe you are some kind of celebrity stalker type, obsessed with Shelley Berkely, with pictures of her hanging all over the walls of your studio and illuminated by never extinguished candle flame.

Please get some help .

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The "must-pass" excuse is just BS. There is no such thing as a "must-pass" bill, in my view. Suppose that instead of a gambling provision Frist had attached, say, a bill repealing the 19th amendment (which gave women the right to vote). Would any senator or representative have said, "Well, we have to pass the port security stuff, so I guess we'll just have to hope that women don't notice this other little provision"? Of course not. They first would have prevented Frist from attaching that amendment in conference committee, or, failing that, they would have denounced it from the hilltops, voted against it, then quickly pushed the port security bill back through committees and to a floor vote, this time unencumbered by the anti-suffrage bits.

So why didn't they have the fortitude to do the same when the unrelated amendment was about gambling? Because they either actually liked the measure, or at least decided that few of their constituents would care deeply enough about it for it to hurt them at the next election. To be blunt, even those who might have thought the bill to be bad public policy put their fingers to the wind and decided that they could be more hurt by political opponents saying "He/she voted against making our ports secure" than "He/she voted to make it really difficult to put money into one's online poker account."