House Voting More Often in the Wee Hours

It was well past midnight yesterday, and the food outside the sumptuous Capitol suites of the House Republican leadership was piling up, a smorgasbord of Chinese dishes, piles of pizza, and cartons of Mrs. Fields cookies. House lawmakers casually dined as they waited for their final votes, knowing full well they still had a long night ahead of them.

Those votes -- on a sweeping budget-cutting measure and a defense bill that also would open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling -- did not come until practically the break of dawn. But that was nothing new for a House that has taken its most controversial votes in recent years under the cloak of darkness -- well past the deadlines for the evening news or the morning paper.

The House voted at 6:07 a.m. yesterday to shave $39.7 billion from entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. At 5:04 a.m., lawmakers voted to open the Alaskan wilderness to oil exploration.

The House's original version of the budget-cutting bill, which was significantly tougher, passed Nov. 18 at 1:41 a.m. On July 28, the Central American Free Trade Agreement -- ardently opposed by labor unions, which had put excruciating pressure on industrial state lawmakers -- squeaked through the House just past midnight. On March 21, a measure that thrust the federal government into the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case passed the House at 12:45 a.m.

And on Nov. 22, 2003, in an extraordinary, three-hour roll call, the House took much of the pre-dawn morning to pass the bill adding prescription drug coverage to Medicare.

In no way do House leaders mean to hide their actions from the public, said Ron Bonjean, a spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). Each case is different, but never were the late-night votes planned.

Sunday night's drama stemmed largely from a last-minute glitch with the budget over a provision that would have required Medicare beneficiaries to pay for repairs to rented oxygen tanks. Ohio Republicans, coming to the defense of a home-state company, threatened to withhold their votes over the provision, but removing it would bring the bill's total savings below $40 billion -- the level demanded by conservatives. In the end, the Ohioans won, but not until the roosters were crowing in the Shenandoah Valley.

Bonjean said that in the Schiavo case, lawmakers were acting as quickly as possible in a case in which a woman's life hung in the balance. And CAFTA had to be squeezed in late to maintain the House's busy schedule that week, he said.

"We don't want to hang our hats and go home" when night falls, Bonjean said. "We want to get our work done."

But Democrats see a pattern here, and they were not about to attribute it to a diligent Republican work ethic. "Republican policy is so out of touch with mainstream Americans that they have to pass their legislation in the dead of night," said Jennifer Crider, spokeswoman for Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).