Nice.

With the economy in deep decline, members of the House will also feel some of the pain, forgoing their annual pay raise next year.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told Democrats in their closed-door caucus meeting on Tuesday that party leaders would tell members of the Appropriations Committee not to include a cost-of-living increase in members' salaries for 2010. Lawmakers will make about $174,000 a year in 2009 - but congressional leaders like Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid make more than that.

Will Republicans follow suit?

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Per the Associated Press:

Rep. Henry Waxman -- a liberal ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- has wrested the chairmanship of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee from veteran Rep. John Dingell when the new Congress convenes in January.

Waxman, a California liberal and avid environmentalist and booster of health care programs, toppled Dingell Thursday on a vote of 137-122 in the Democratic Party caucus, capping a bitter fight within party ranks.

Dingell has been the top Democrat on the panel for 28 years and is an old-school supporter of the auto industry. Waxman has complained that the committee has been too slow to address environmental issues like global warming.

As I said yesterday, I really did not know how this vote was going to go down today, and was at least somewhat skeptical Henry Waxman was going to be able to pull this one off. Yet despite all of the talk of the House Democratic caucus being conservative (remember all of the discussion about the Heath Shulers of the caucus in the aftermath of the 2006 midterms making it seem like the party as a whole was right of center), House Democrats remain quite progressive and could serve as the most progressive voice in negotiations with the Senate and the White House over legislation in the coming Congress.

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From Congress Daily (subscription required):

By a three-vote margin, the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee today recommended that Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman be given the chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee, but a final decision will most likely be made by the full Democratic Caucus Thursday. The Steering Committee voted 25-22 in favor of Waxman to replace Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell, according to lawmakers leaving the meeting.

This isn't over, as the entire House Democratic caucus will have the opportunity to have their say on the epic battle between the relative newcomer Henry Waxman, with just 34 years of service in the House, and John Dingell, with 53 years of service (following another 22 years of service by his eponymous father). And, at least from this vantage, it's not clear which of the two will have the edge in the full caucus, with Blue Dogs and those strongly supporting the seniority system (notably the Congressional Black Caucus) backing Dingell and more progressive forces backing Waxman. CQ Politics does note that the last time the steering panel upended a chairman or ranking member, the full caucus subsequently overturned the decision, but this one appears to be still up in the air.

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Yesterday I went to a free lunch here at Boalt Hall (UC Berkeley's law school) sponsored by the Federalist Society. (Yes, I know. Worry not. I'm not defecting -- I'm just getting a free lunch.) There the editor of The Weekly Standard, Terry Eastland, gave his outlook of the 2008 elections. You could say it was interesting.

Among the gems put forward by Eastland was the one saying that the Democratic Congress had largely failed to follow through on its promises for profound change. I believe he cited the common wisdom that the Democrats had only made good one a single one of the planks of the "6 in '06" platform. I don't think it would be difficult to argue that the Democrats have not accomplished what they had hoped to on Iraq -- they have been able to secure majorities in both chambers in favor of a timeline for withdrawal of American troops, a feat not expected to be possible at the outset of the Congress, but still far short of actually ending the war. Yet would it be proper to say that the Democrats have failed on their other promises, particularly those relating to domestic matters? The Hill editor Bob Cusack takes a look at the record of the Democratic Congress and writes the following today on the front page of his paper under the heading, "Democrats make progress on their checklist from 2006".

After a slow start, the Democratic-led Congress has started to gain traction on its domestic agenda.

The passage of the student loan bill on Friday is the fourth measure headed to  President Bush's desk from the Democrats' "Six in '06" campaign pledge. If Bush signs the education bill as expected, three of the Democrats' high-profile legislative promises will have become law less than nine months into their majority.

[...]

Raising the minimum wage, which was the first bill of the Six in '06 pledge signed into law this year, was included in the Iraq supplemental measure. But Democrats were in no mood to crow at the time, having lost the showdown with Bush on timelines for troop withdrawals.

Since then, Democrats have made steady progress on the domestic front.

In early August, Bush signed the bill that implements the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, another item on Six in '06.

That bill, along with the student loan measure, faced tougher-than-anticipated paths to passage. Provisions of the 9/11 measure ran into opposition from wary industry groups that feared enhanced government inspections would hamper commerce. It was also slowed by jurisdictional battles among House and Senate chairmen.

The education legislation faced fierce resistance from the student lending industry and veto threats from the White House. Democrats, however, worked with the Bush administration to alter the bill, and -- to the dismay of lenders -- the president is expected to sign it this month.

So of the six key planks of the Democrats' domestic policy platform, the Democratic Congress will have enacted into law at least three within the first nine months of its inception; sent another one to the desk of the President to be vetoed (increasing federal funding for stem cell research); and passed another one through both chambers, which is now moving through the reconciliation process (energy). In fact, the only plank the Democrats have not been able to pass through both chambers is legislation enabling the federal government to negotiate the price of prescription drugs, legislation that is holed up in the Senate due to a Republican filibuster.

I do not mean to minimize the entirely justifiable disappoitment many have with the Democratic Congress for not having ended the war. I, too, share such a sentiment, even as I acknowledge that the balance of powers make it much more difficult than I believe it should be for a change in power in Congress to effect a change in American foreign policy. At the same time, credit probably should go where credit is due. And the fact that the Democrats have been able to make good on a good number of their domestic priorities does warrant at least some applause from the peanut gallery, so it's good to see an article like this one in The Hill every once in a while.

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For a long while I've tried to debunk the myth that the Democrats are not running a significantly more open House of Representatives than did the Republicans when they were in office. Whenever Republicans were able to inject this false meme into the media, I have tried to rebut it with facts, such as the fact that the Democrats, already in February, had allowed more open rules than the Republicans had during the entirety of the 109th Congress. Now it looks like The Politico, which had previously peddled this trash, is somewhat inadvertently undercutting the GOP contention. Check out the 15th paragraph of an article posted today by Martin Kady II on the culture of the current Congress (which he says, despite his reporting on House rules, is not entirely different from that of the previous Republican Congress).

Statistically speaking, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has given Republicans a stronger voice in the minority -- allowing more amendments under so-called "open rules" on the House floor than her GOP predecessors did. Midway through the 2007 session, Democrats had allowed eight open rules compared with two under Republicans last year. And the majority allowed 60 GOP amendments, compared with 51 Democratic amendments authorized by Republicans halfway through last year.

The Republicans, both in the House and the Senate, are playing extremely poorly, not only falsely complaining about Democrats abusing the rules but also themselves abusing the rules of both chambers. Whether it is Republicans increasingly desperate attempts at delaying progress in the House or the Senate GOP's destruction of all records in terms of filibusters, the Republicans have done all they can to make Congress not work.

Congressional Democrats, however, have been affording the GOP more opportunities than the GOP ever gave the Democrats. Perhaps there's a partisan argument that the Democrats should be running a more closed Congress in able to ram through their agenda. But this is certainly not what they are doing. They have been able to pass a great deal of their platform in remarkably quick order even as the Republicans have abused the system. So Kady, and others, may argue that the current Congress is being run no different than previous Republican Congresses, which set records for partisan excesses, the fact is the Democrats are running a tight, but fair ship and should be given significant credit for doing so.

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