Florida congressman Francis Rooney was being interviewed by Chris Hayes on MSNBC about the Senate's version of the health care bill.
Hayes: They're going make you vote on the Senate bill. You realize that, right? They're gonna bring that thing over and they're gonna jam it down the House caucus's throat. And this process is then going to be you're process, because you in the House are gonna have to own it.Rooney has been in office since January, and he's still doesn't know at all how the legislative process works. That's because this Republican congress has done essentially nothing since taking office in January. He doesn't know about the conference committee because the Republican congress hasn't gone through process yet.
Rooney: Well, I don't know. Isn't there something called a, like a ... compromise committee or something, when two different bills are different and they come together to...
Hayes: Yes, the conference committee. They're going to bypass it and they're going to make you, sir, they're going to make you vote for this thing.
Rooney: Oh, I don't know about that. I'll have to check into that.
It is obscene that Rooney doesn't even know what the conference committee is called. This is Rooney's job, and he's completely unfamiliar with it. A tenth grader knows more about how the government works than a Republican member of congress!
(I don't fault Rooney for being out of the loop on the Senate's dirty tricks, though you'd think Republican representatives would be leery about getting shafted again by the health care bill after Trump called the bill Rooney voted for "mean".)
The conference committee is isn't some arcane point of parliamentary procedure. It's the guts of the legislative process: how bills get passed.
Rooney was previously the Vatican ambassador under George W. Bush, and looks to be a fourth-generation know-nothing heir to a large construction corporation that sucks on the government's teat, building all kinds of government buildings, presidential libraries, public universities and various Pentagon contracts.
This is why the Republican Party is so bad. It's run by a clique of Washington insiders like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, who lead a bunch of ignorant rich boys (or rich boys' puppets) from the boondocks of the South and West (whose granddaddies and daddies got wealthy off the government), while bitching about how terrible the government is.
Because these zeroes are totally oblivious about how the mechanics of government works, they can pass themselves off as "authentic" and "outsiders" and get suckers who always vote Republican to vote for them. But in the end they're just representing their own interests or the interests of the billionaires who bought the election for them, and damn the people who voted for them.
Rooney and Trump are peas in a pod: they know nothing about the jobs they were elected to perform, and apparently have no interest in learning about them.
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