This past week, the House of Representatives really struggled to finish their work before they were able to take off for their week-long Independence Day holiday recess. You see, members of Congress have been hearing from you loud and clear, especially when it comes to the out-of-control spending. They have heard your voices so loudly that they are now afraid to vote on big expensive bills, hence the struggles from last week. Let me set the stage a bit. The House has had in its chambers the very important war funding bill since late May. The POTUS requested it in March and it was to fund our two ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to replenish FEMA. He used the "emergency designation" so as to not ask Congress to pay the tab associated with the bill. The cost at the time of the request was $33B. The Senate dealt with the bill first, in part because Speaker Pelosi was afraid she couldn't get her members to vote for the bill because of its price tag. So the Senate had the first legislative crack at the bill. They porked-up the bill to a grand total of $60B. All of this is added directly onto the debt because the POTUS designated it as an “emergency”. Now it is the House of Representatives' turn to pass this vital funding bill. However, the Speaker can't muster the votes needed to pass the bill. She had the perfect storm of problems brewing in her chamber with this piece of legislation this past week. The fiscally conservative "blue dog" democrats in the House didn't like the huge spending. They number in the mid 50's as far as a voting bloc in the House. The anti-war, "move-on" liberal democrats didn't like the underlying bill, because they hate both wars. Now add to this the House purest that are upset that Congress hasn’t passed a Budget for the first time in our Nation’s history. All of this added up to a perfect storm for the Speaker to have to navigate through. Defense Secretary Gates has been screaming for this money to fund the Department of Defense for weeks and the Speaker continued to put him off. Well, last Thursday night, Speaker Pelosi had to "fish or cut bait" as they say. What did she end up doing to get this bill through the House of Representatives by a vote of 215 to 210? She added an entire 1 year budget resolution to the text of the bill and then deemed it passed! That's right, remember the "Slaughter Rule" from the Health Care debate days? This is the rule named for the Chair- person of the House Rules committee Louise Slaughter (D-NY). The Slaughter Rule would have allowed members of the House of Representative to vote on the rule governing floor consideration of the Health Care bill and that was going to count as the final vote on passing Obama care. The public made such a fuss about the "Slaughter Rule" being used to allow members to bypass the final vote, that the leadership abandoned the idea at the last minute. This 90 sec Youtube video will remind you of that time in our country's legislative history that wasn't destined for the history books. Well, Speaker Pelosi resurrected the "Slaughter Rule" and that is how she was able to get the votes to advance the War Supplemental through her chamber late Thursday night. They voted on the rule that governed the debate limits for the War Supplemental. The vote passing the rule counted as the vote for final passage of the $80B dollar War supplemental appropriations bill along with the budget resolution. As the video says, first members of Congress don't read the bills, now they don't even vote on them, and they can become law. As we all enjoyed our Nation’s birthday this past weekend, and some of us gave thanks to those brave men and women who fought to give us our wonderful independence, we need to be equally thankful that this current batch of members of the House of Representatives weren’t called upon to help out….. “back in the day.”

Stay tuned,

Elizabeth B. Letchworth is a former 4 times elected United States Senate Secretary for the Majority and Minority-(retired). Currently she is the owner of GradeGov.com http://www.gradegov.com/