Remember last year, when the Fat Denny at the urging of the Bug-man broke House tradition (and Rules) to keep voting on the Medicare Big Pharma giveaway act open so they could twist a few more arms and threaten a few more republicans?

Arms have always been twisted during close congressional votes on major legislation, but an ethics report rebuking House Majority Leader Tom DeLay added something the public rarely learns: what lawmakers really say to each other.

The House ethics committee report even reveals what Republican members didn't say — but were thinking — as they unsuccessfully pleaded with Rep. Nick Smith R-Mich., to support a prescription drug benefit in Medicare.

The following are thoughts, comments and remembrances of the November 2003 events, as told to ethics committee investigators for their report on attempts to pressure Smith.

As DeLay, R-Texas, approached Smith in late November 2003, he was thinking — based on prior conversations — that he would be "stuck" talking with the Michigan lawmaker for a long time.

That might explain why the following conversation lasted only eight seconds.

DeLay: "I will personally endorse your son (a candidate for Congress). That's my last offer."

There was, in fact, no first offer. DeLay said it was his exit strategy to end the conversation quickly.

It was long enough, though, for the House ethics committee on Thursday to criticize DeLay for trying to trade a political endorsement for a vote. The committee also rebuked Rep. Candice Miller , R-Mich., for a heavy-handed attempt at persuasion, and Smith himself, for making exaggerated statements about the pressure he received.

On Friday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said, "This offer of a quid pro quo further taints the Republicans' Medicare prescription drug bill."

The attempts to link Smith's vote to his son's candidacy was pervasive throughout the ethics report. Brad Smith eventually lost in the primary as he tried to succeed his retiring father.

Most of the approaches occurred during the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 22, 2003, when the Medicare vote was held open by GOP leaders from 3 a.m. to 5:51 a.m. Normally, a typical 15-minute vote may be held open about five minutes for late-arriving members.

The government's top expert on Medicare costs was warned that he would be fired if he told key lawmakers about a series of Bush administration cost estimates that could have torpedoed congressional passage of the White House-backed Medicare prescription-drug plan.
...
Richard S. Foster, the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which produced the $551 billion estimate, told colleagues last June that he would be fired if he revealed numbers relating to the higher estimate to lawmakers.

"This whole episode which has now gone on for three weeks has been pretty nightmarish," Foster wrote in an e-mail to some of his colleagues June 26, just before the first congressional vote on the drug bill. "I'm perhaps no longer in grave danger of being fired, but there remains a strong likelihood that I will have to resign in protest of the withholding of important technical information from key policy makers for political reasons."

The White House released budget figures yesterday indicating that the new Medicare prescription drug benefit will cost more than $1.2 trillion in the coming decade, a much higher price tag than President Bush suggested when he narrowly won passage of the law in late 2003.

The projections represent the most complete picture to date of how much the program will cost after it begins next year. The expense of the new drug benefit has been a source of much controversy since the day Congress approved it, with Democrats and some Republicans complaining that the White House has consistently low-balled the expected cost to the government.

When this is "all over" a few years from now, we'll either be the United States of Christo-Fascism or trying real hard to forget this as we pay the massive debts left for us by these lying thieves.