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By MARY JACOBY, Times Staff WriterA public fracas exposes the minority party's long-simmering resentment of its treatment by the majority Republicans.
WASHINGTON - There's these two gangs, you see: the Republicans and the Democrats. They hang out in a honky-tonk called the House of Representatives, fighting over the jukebox.
The guys with the "GOP" tattoos usually pick the music, because they control the place. But occasionally they order up a tune everyone likes, like that popular ditty "pension reform."
So there was little reason to expect that on July 18 a bipartisan bill to revise employer retirement plans would trigger a brawl so ferocious that relations between House Democrats and Republicans would reach a turning point.
But that appears to be the legacy of a recent fracas in the House Ways and Means Committee, whose chairman, Rep. Bill Thomas of California, delivered a tearful apology on the House floor last week after GOP leaders ordered him to make amends for calling the police on the panel's Democrats.
Democratic anger was fueled by years of complaints about high-handed treatment by Republican committee chairmen, who Democrats say generally refuse to listen to their ideas or opinions.
These complaints, of course, are exactly the ones Republicans made in the late 1980s and early 1990s, just before ending the Democrats' 40-year reign in Congress. Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein said Republicans are in danger of falling into the same leadership trap as Democrats did when they ran the House.
"Events like this tend further to radicalize even the most moderate Democrats," said Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute. "For a lot of Republicans leaders, I think the attitude has been, "So what? They oppressed us for years, we'll oppress them. We've got the votes.'
"But when you start to play with the rules, as Thomas did, then you can move this too far. And there's going to come a time when you need the minority," but they won't be there.
There are 229 Republicans, 205 Democrats and one independent in the House.
For their part, Democrats say they have had enough.
"It really put in graphic terms the arrogance of the majority," said New York Rep. Charles Rangel, the top Democrat on the tax-writing Ways and Means panel.
Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., acknowledged that Republicans have the votes to prevail in the House but asked why they could not be more gracious to the minority.
"Republicans too often do not even want to hear what the Democrats have to say," Hoyer said.
The Ways and Means incident began when Thomas made a last-minute switch, substituting one pension bill for a new measure that the Democrats had never seen. He then insisted the Democratic committee members vote on it.
But Democrats took advantage of parliamentary rules and demanded the committee clerk start a line-by-line reading of the bill. Then they decamped to the committee library, leaving behind Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., to object if Thomas tried to move forward.
Quick as a switch, Thomas gaveled the bill-reading to a close. Stark objected. Thomas said it was too late, and he called the Capitol police to arrest the Democrats in the committee library. The police, recognizing a political minefield, quickly retreated.
But that did not stop Stark from insulting Thomas, prompting Rep. Scott McInnis, R-Colo., to mutter, "Shut up."
The 71-year-old Democrat exploded. "Come over here and make me, you little wimp! I dare you. ... You little fruitcake. You little fruitcake. I said you are a fruitcake!"
Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., later summed it up for Fox News Sunday. "There was a lot of juvenile behavior there. People ought to grow up."
In the way it has galvanized Democrats, the melee in the Ways and Means Committee was reminiscent of the 1985 dispute in the House over the razor-thin election results in an Indiana race.
The then-minority Republicans exploded when Democrats seated incumbent Frank McCloskey over Republican challenger Richard McIntyre while the election was still contested.
"That was surely the thing that most incensed the Republicans" in the 1980s, said David Rohde, a political science professor at the University of Michigan.
In the 1990s, Republicans focused on the Democratic-led House Rules Committee, which set terms of floor debate and routinely denied GOP requests to offer amendments to bills. For years, the inability to offer amendments was a rallying cry for Republicans. When they finally won control of the House in 1994, they vowed to run the place more benevolently.
And so, the new GOP majority allowed Democrats to offer all the amendments they wanted - and soon found House floor business hopelessly snarled. Republicans dropped the idea.
"The reality is, Republicans want to win," Rohde said. "If they can use the rules to advance their legislative agenda, they'll do it."
The only House panel where Democrats and Republicans have a good working relationship is the House Appropriations Committee, observers say. The panel's chairman, Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Largo, is proud of what he calls his "balancing act."
"It's important to keep things from totally erupting. Every member has been elected by approximately 600,000 people and has the same rights under the constitution. The majority party obviously controls the agenda, but every member has a right to participate," Young said.
Democrats are vowing to stir things up the way Republicans did in the early 1990s, but the reality is they have few legislative tools at their disposal. Unlike Senate Democrats, they cannot filibuster bills. Nor can they stall judicial nominations, because the House does not have the Senate's constitutional "advise and consent" role.
But by lining up against GOP measures, Democrats can move conservative bills more toward the political center. GOP leaders had to scale-back a bill to overhaul the Head Start early childhood development program, for example, to satisfy moderate Republicans because they could not count on Democratic votes. The Head Start bill passed the House 217-216 on Friday and now faces an uncertain future in the Senate.
Democrats can also complain loudly about GOP heavy-handedness and tie up the House floor by demanding time-consuming votes on pointless motions.
The minority party has been doing both lately. Last week, they demanded votes on motions to rise from the Committee of the Whole, to adjourn and to reconsider votes - all in an attempt to make Republicans consider a bill to expand the child tax credit.
Asked if Democrats would continue to use such tactics, Rangel said: "You ain't seen nothing yet."