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It seems that the various Children Of The Damned in the House got themselves flummoxed by Steny Hoyer this morning and, confused by the subtleties of the job they were elected to do, retreated en masse to their respective happy places, there to curl up with Glenn Beck on the radio and a most towel close at hand.

This has always been one of the things that has driven me over the edge with these people. Like it or not, legislative bodies operate not only on their formal rules, but also on an intricate code of informal, interpersonal courtesies. Just as is the case with, say, baseball, there is the written law (Ninety feet between bases. Who gets to be Speaker?) and unwritten law (Hit my pitcher and yours is going down. Respect my hold on nominations and I'll respect yours.) — much of which makes sense. And much of it doesn't. But it's crucial to keep the whole process from degenerating into the kind of whole-scale pissing match that we're seeing today.

The Republicans, quite simply, have torn up that unwritten rulebook and tossed the scraps of it to the four winds. They did it with judicial appointments during the Bush years, when they forced the idiotic Gang of 14 compromise on the filibuster, on which they have completely reneged during the Obama administration. They have broken the informal agreement that filibusters should be rare. Raising the debt ceiling had been a pro forma vote before these people got a hold of it. And here we have this thing today, when Hoyer made a perfectly legitimate request for a unanimous consent vote, and the adolescent in the chair simply walks away.

I think it all began with the Clinton impeachment — which, it should always be recalled, was in the wind long before Bill met Monica. The Republicans decided, among themselves, that they could impeach any Democratic president on any grounds simply because they had the votes to do it. This violated not only the expressed intent of the Founders, who deliberately chose not to include "maladministration" among the stated offenses for which a president could be impeached, but also the sturdy informal consensus that had stood the country in good stead since the impeachment of Andrew Johnson — namely, that a president could only be impeached for clearly criminal conduct in office. Remember it took two years of revelations about Watergate before a Democratically-controlled Congress (reluctantly) took up the matter. Tip O'Neill even actively squashed an earlier attempt by Congressman Robert Drinan to bring a bill of impeachment forward regarding the "secret" bombing of Cambodia. The 100th Congress had Democratic majorities in both chambers, and yet it moved heaven and earth to avoid even considering the question of impeaching Ronald Reagan over the crimes of the Iran-Contra affair. (Which even that crusty old villain, Edwin Meese, had warned Reagan at the time he was committing them were clearly impeachable.) All of Washington had agreed for over 100 years that impeachment was for only the most serious and obvious of crimes, and not even necessarily for them, if the president twinkled a lot and reminded everyone of their Grampa.

Then, of course, along came the new Republican House majority under Newt Gingrich. They rewrote the formal rulebook which, to be entirely fair, really needed some of its more sclerotic provisions cleaned out. But they threw out the unwritten rules entirely. This culminated in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and everything that has followed after, right up until this morning. They are not legislators. They are vandals in the house of democracy.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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