Vampire Legislators

This is what really sticks in my craw about Kirk--he could have been a statesman and voted no just on these grounds alone--the way the cap and tax bill was managed by Nancy Pelosi was profoundly undemocratic, but no, he left that video up on his website, for days, that he read the bill. TAS:

Indeed, House leadership crafted much of the ACES Act in secret behind closed doors. In the week before the final vote, it grew by a whopping 600 pages. Even that figure doesn't stress the urgent, secretive nature of the process. At 3:09 Friday morning, Waxman et al. introduced a 309-page "manager's amendment" to the legislation that was set for a vote later in the day.

Representatives would have had all of nine hours to study the text, assuming they went without sleep. The manager's amendment made even that impossible, because you had roughly 1,200 pages of text -- containing, at last count, 397 new government regulations and 1,090 new economic mandates -- followed by over 300 pages of text with no index that amended the previous legislation on paragraph by paragraph basis.

It would take a team of lawyers several days to sort out a mess like that.

It was only by Boehner reading through some of the 3 AM measures added to the bill, despite the strong objections of Henry Waxman, that we learned about some of the most onerous ones. What a bunch of blood-suckers. Vampire legislators.

P.S. Energy czarina Carol Browner hasn't read the bill--and whines when she's asked about it. Via NRO, video.