Yes, Steny Hoyer said that right out loud. It amazes me how powerful this caucus of barking dogs who act like Republicans really is. It is more powerful than any of us in the party.
It is more powerful than any other caucus. It has more power than all of us activists calling and writing and begging and pleading.
All they have to do is threaten and they get their way.
Steny Hoyer's words to The Politico yesterday.
How Hoyer got the deal doneHoyer said that if House Democratic leaders failed to reach a FISA deal with the White House and GOP leaders, as many as “30 Blue Dogs and another 20 to 30 members” could have signed onto a Republican discharge petition calling for a floor vote on the Senate version of the FISA bill, which was even more anathema to House Democrats than what eventually passed. Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.) confirmed that “there were a lot of Blue Dogs getting anxious” and “a lot” of them would have signed a discharge petition.“You can take a position and be a purist and sort of sit around yelling at each
across the divide and nothing gets done,” Hoyer said. “The American people, they want us to get this done. That’s the whole thing to me.” Poor anxious Blue Dogs, can't have that. But we can have hundreds of thousands of activists realizing they just got screwed again...this time by their own party giving Bush more spying powers and lessening the role of the FISA Court. That's ok. Making us angry is ok.
That is real power. Steny's office went so far as to deny that he was working on the FISA fix. They were very secretive about it.
The rest of us are "purists." The Blue Dogs are not considered "purists." They are powerful in their demands. They have the leadership wrapped around their little fingers.
Pelosi voted in favor of the FISA bill, and she offered both public and private praise for Hoyer’s work on it. The two held one-on-one talks during the negotiations, with even their top staff cut out, and Hoyer was well aware of what Pelosi would want before she’d let the legislation get to the floor. The two embraced on the House floor after the vote, a visual display of détente between two leaders who have had their differences over the years.
“It’s a very difficult task many competing views as to how we should go forward,” Pelosi said on the House floor prior to Friday’s FISA vote. “Mr. Hoyer handled it all with great intellect and great respect for all of those views. Thank you, Mr. Hoyer.”
That is not true. They totally ignored the hundreds of thousands of voices who opposed it. They just simply ignored us.
Hoyer made it personal, he declared himself a hero for working so tirelessly to push this bill through.
Hoyer knew it was coming, and he persevered anyway. That he did so speaks volumes about who he is: a master of cloakroom politics who can use his friendships across the aisle to strike deals, even if others demand that his party hew closer to the positions that put it in power in 2006.
In an interview with Politico on Monday, Hoyer called the FISA legislation a “significant victory” for the Democratic Party — one that neutralized an issue Republicans might have been able to use against Democrats in November while still, in his view, protecting the civil liberties of American citizens.
..."According to several Democratic insiders, Hoyer was able to keep the talks going by pointing out that he, more than anyone else in the room, was taking a huge political risk by trying to reach a deal. The Democratic leader in the House was also able to bridge the rancor between the two main Senate negotiators and their respective aides, joking frequently during tense negotiations and keeping the conversation going despite an obvious animosity in the room, aides said. Similarly, Hoyer and staff worked closely with his friend Blunt to make sure both sides kept in close contact in the House.
It was all about keeping the Blue Dog caucus happy. To hell with the rest of us and our purist demands about the constitution and privacy and silly stuff like that.
And the House with
58 more YES votes since last year made Bush a very happy man.
