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It was an impressive run, with some in his office calling it the best winning streak of his career. Except for one thing.
By my last week in Washington, all of his victories had been rolled back, each carefully nurtured amendment perishing in the grossly corrupt and absurd vortex of political dysfunction that is today's U.S. Congress. What began as a tale of political valor ended as a grotesque object lesson in the ugly realities of American politics -- the pitfalls of digging for hope in a shit mountain.
Sanders, to his credit, was still glad that I had come. "It's good that you saw this," he said. "People need to know."
Amendment 1
At 2 p.m. on Wednesday, July 20th, Sanders leaves his office in the Rayburn Building and heads down a tunnel passageway to the Capitol, en route to a Rules Committee hearing. "People have this impression that you can raise any amendment you want," he says. "They say, 'Why aren't you doing something about this?' That's not the way the system works."
Amendments occupy a great deal of most legislators' time, particularly those lawmakers in the minority. Members of Congress do author major bills, but more commonly they make minor adjustments to the bigger bills. Rather than write their own anti-terrorism bill, for instance, lawmakers will try to amend the Patriot Act, either by creating a new clause in the law or expanding or limiting some existing provision. The bill that ultimately becomes law is an aggregate of the original legislation and all the amendments offered and passed by all the different congresspersons along the way.
Sanders is the amendment king of the current House of Representatives. Since the Republicans took over Congress in 1995, no other lawmaker -- not Tom DeLay, not Nancy Pelosi -- has passed more roll-call amendments (amendments that actually went to a vote on the floor) than Bernie Sanders. He accomplishes this on the one hand by being relentlessly active, and on the other by using his status as an Independent to form left-right coalitions.
On this particular day, Sanders carries with him an amendment to Section 215 of the second version of the Patriot Act, which is due to go to the House floor for a reauthorization vote the next day. Unlike many such measures, which are often arcane and shrouded in minutiae, the Sanders amendment is simple, a proposed rollback of one of the Patriot Act's most egregious powers: Section 215 allows law enforcement to conduct broad searches of ordinary citizens -- even those not suspected of ties to terrorism -- without any judicial oversight at all. To a civil libertarian like Sanders, it is probably a gross insult that at as late a date as the year 2005 he still has to spend his time defending a concept like probable cause before an ostensibly enlightened legislature. But the legislation itself will prove not half as insulting as the roadblocks he must overcome to force a vote on the issue.
The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination -- a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish. The official function of the committee is to decide which bills and amendments will be voted on by Congress and also to schedule tamendment, your amendment dies. If you control the Rules Committee, you control Congress.
The committee has nine majority members and four minority members. But in fact, only one of those thirteen people matters. Unlike on most committees, whose chairmen are usually chosen on the basis of seniority, the Rules chairman is the appointee of the Speaker of the House.
The current chairman, David Dreier, is a pencil-necked Christian Scientist from Southern California, with exquisite hygiene and a passion for brightly colored ties. While a dependable enough yes man to have remained Rules chairman for six years now, he is basically a human appendage, a prosthetic attachment on the person of the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. "David carries out the wishes of the Republican leadership right down the line,'' said former Texas Congressman Martin Frost, until last year the committee's ranking Democrat.
There is no proven method of influencing the Rules Committee. In fact, in taking on the committee, Democrats and Independents like Sanders normally have only one weapon at their disposal.
"Shame," says James McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat and one of the minority members on the committee.
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