House leaders push through ‘doc fix’ bill on a voice vote while conservatives were not on the floor

 According to this article the House leadership (the establishment Republicans) used a voice vote via a temporary “suspension of the rules” in order to push through the “doc fix” Medicare expansion bill while very few members were actually on the House Floor to vote.

 This was apparently done with the intent of silencing the conservative Republicans’ opposition to the legislation and the vote took approximately 30 seconds according to the story.

  The establishment Republicans are defending this by claiming the bill would have passed anyway but of course we will never know for sure because of the rule suspension. If this is true why was this backhanded measure used in the first place if the votes were there? The establishment Republicans claimed that there was some deadline which must be met but I am not buying it and neither are the conservatives in the House who saw their voices silenced.

  Here is what some of them are saying:

“I think they pulled a fast one,” Kansas Republican Rep. Tim Huelskamp, who had planned to vote against the temporary fix

Leadership, he said, “misled conservatives and all of the Republican conference.”

He called the temporary doc fix a “gimmick,” and said passing it was “exactly what the Republican leadership totally and honestly promised they were not going to do on this issue.”

“This has become the way they operate,” he said of party leadership, calling the vote “disappointing.”

Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert voiced his displeasure in a floor speech following the vote — calling the vote “a surprising twist.”

“So I was very surprised today that with us in the majority, our own leadership in charge, something as important as the doctor fix would be brought to the floor on a voice vote,” Gohmert said.

“Now I know that I need to get with some other members and make sure we have people on the floor, since we won’t be sure what our own leadership is going to do,” he went on. “That’s very unfortunate. It’s unfortunate. You need to be able to trust your own leadership.”

Michigan Republican Rep. Justin Amash had a similar take.

“Short on votes for controversial spending bill, so GOP & Dem leaders rammed it through by ‘voice vote’ in empty House chamber. Not right,” Amash tweeted Thursday afternoon.

  But the kicker came from Paul Broun who compared John Boehner to Vladimir Putin:

“I consider it a step backwards for democracy,” he said in a statement to TheDC. “This Putin-esque behavior is an example of why I voted against Boehner as Speaker of the House.”

  This of course is not surprising when you consider the fact that John Boehner punished the conservative members of the House by removing them from Committee Chairs for not toeing the establishment Republican party line while threatening to punish others if they did not learn from this action.

  I  just wish John Boehner had as much vigor and interest in going after Barack Obama and his radical policies as he does with silencing the conservative caucus in his own party.

  This issue is not about whether or not you agree with the outcome of the vote but rather with the way the vote was conducted, for a certain segment of our elected officials were not allowed to voice their opinions which, by proxy, means their constituents were not represented.

  While many Republicans are claiming that Barack Obama is lawless we can see by his actions that John Boehner is no better for while no laws were broken and the Constitution, in Article I Section 5 states “each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings” this certainly seems to have been underhanded and a violation of what Montesquieu called the “Spirit of the Laws.”