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Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick's taking the oath via TV apparently wasn't good enough. He and another congressman had to re-do it Thursday. Fitzpatrick and Texas Republican Congressman Pete Sessions were at a reception for about 500 Fitzpatrick supporters in the Capitol Visitor Center when Speaker of the House John A. Boehner began administering the oath of office over on the House floor.

Seeing the swearing in taking place on TV, Fitzpatrick and Sessions raised their hands to take the oath. A Courier Times photographer's photo of the "long-distance" swearing in and the accompanying story in Thursday's paper created a buzz on Capitol Hill and, by the afternoon, House proceedings ground to a halt because of concerns the two congressmen weren't officially sworn in.

By that point, a half dozen votes had already taken place.

Fitzpatrick and Sessions were sworn in again by Boehner on Thursday about 3 p.m., but it made for an embarrassing first day for Fitzpatrick and the Republicans.
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Congressman Pete Sessions, TX and Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick accept the oath of office surround by 500 Fitzpatrick supporters in the Capitol Visitors Center.

Fitzpatrick spokesman Darren Smith said the congressman had been on the House floor, voted for Boehner as speaker and signed a written oath of office. Because of what Smith called a "very fluid" schedule for the day's events, Fitzpatrick and Sessions left the House floor to go to the reception. "At one point, Mike wanted to go over to see all those people who had traveled down to see the swearing in," Smith said.

Jordan Yeager, solicitor for the Bucks County Democratic Committee, called Fitzpatrick's gaffe "embarrassing." "You have one main responsibility that day - to take the oath of office," said Yeager.

Their "fix" is to officially tag the two as the men who weren't there, through a resolution that will ask the House to nullify their votes - but not the voting results. The House, among other things, voted Wednesday to establish new rules for operating the chamber. But the fix only will bring yet another embarrassment.
The resolution to correct the record is the same one that will set debate rules for the signature Republican legislation next week: repeal of the new law that changed health care insurance coverage in the nation. Democrats can now mix in the question of improper Republican voting with their vigorous opposition to the repeal.

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Republicans made history Thursday by staging the first-ever reading of the entire Constitution on the House floor. But that record may come with an asterisk: Democrats asked why original sections that later were amended, including references to slaves, were left out of the recital, and lawmakers initially did not catch that a couple of key paragraphs were omitted when two pages got stuck together.

The glitch was remedied several hours later when Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., the organizer of the event, returned to the House floor to acknowledge that one of the readers had turned two pages at once, resulting in the omission of an Article IV section on the federal government protecting states from invasion and an Article V section on amending the Constitution. Goodlatte proceeded to read the missing words into the Congressional Record.

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Is Rep. Michele Bachmann’s new post on the House Intelligence Committee an effort by GOP leadership to stifle her inflammatory statements in the media? The steering committee slotted her for the House Intelligence Committee, a rather Machiavellian move: While on paper it’s a prestigious assignment, the committee’s workings are intrinsically hush-hush. As one observer told Politico, “If you’re looking for media and controversy, that’s not the committee to be on.” That’s particularly rough for Bachmann, powered as she is by media attention.

Bachmann may not find the committee all that interesting, but also she’s not likely to enjoy the silence that the committee demands of its members.

A senior CIA official who spent a lot of time with the congressional oversight panels before retiring a few years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, however, predicted Bachmann would quickly become bored.

Most of the members take very little interest since the work is not in the public eye so there is no TV time, there is no money for their constituents and very little opportunity for pork," he observed, speaking on condition of anonymity because he consults with U.S. national security agencies.

But [David M. Barrett, author of "The CIA and Congress"], noted that some committee members find it intolerable not to go public over things they feel strongly about.

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“Well, this ought to work out well,” a longtime Capitol Hill observer e-mailed me last month, chortling over news that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) had been named to the House intelligence committee.

Indeed, liberal pundits have been cackling over the appointment since the tea party icon announced it on her Facebook page in mid-December, not long after she had made news with her specious charge that “the president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day."

A poll taken by Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning truth squad of the St. Petersburg Times, named it the second “biggest lie of the year.” Some people think we can expect even more fireworks from Bachmann now that she's on the intelligence committee.

But her penchant for seeking the spotlight with outrageous charges, observers say, is inimical to membership on the secretive panel, whose meetings are almost entirely behind closed doors and highly classified.

In the past, says David M. Barrett, author of the authoritative “The CIA and Congress,” committee chairmen “discreetly excluded” members they didn't trust from “occasional key interactions with CIA leaders.”

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Repealing President Barack Obama's landmark health care overhaul would add billions to government red ink and leave millions without coverage, Congress' nonpartisan budget referees said Thursday.

House Speaker John Boehner told reporters: "I do not believe that repealing the job-killing health care law will increase the deficit.” The budget experts are "entitled to their opinion," added Boehner, R-Ohio Republicans claim even if it's technically accurate that the health care law reduces deficits in the short run, a program that big is bound to bust the budget over the long term - and repealing it now will save money later.

House Republicans have named their legislation the "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act," and they released a report Thursday to make their case. It challenged economic studies that have portrayed the law in a favorable light, and offered evidence from competing studies that forecast job loss and higher costs.

But the House GOP report raised some questions of its own. Using a partial quote from a Congressional Budget Office study, the Republican report suggested that the nonpartisan office agreed that the law will cause significant job losses. In fact, what the CBO actually said was that the law will "reduce the amount of labor used in the economy by a small amount." In the Republican report "small amount" was replaced by an ellipsis. And CBO said most of that would come not from employers cutting jobs, but from people deciding they don't need to work as much because they can get health insurance more easily.

An Associated Press-GfK survey in November found those favoring repeal were outnumbered nearly 2-to-1 by those who said the law should be left as it is, or changed to do more.

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How "open" will House Speaker John Boehner's (R-OH) more-open House of Representatives be? That's up to John Boehner. At his first press conference as House Speaker Thursday morning, Boehner cautioned that the implementation of the GOP's transparency promise will be left to his discretion. That includes the Repeal of the Job Killing Health Care Law Act -- which will be expedited to the floor without amendment.

The health care repeal was exempted from the GOP's new budget rules, and he won't be allowing Democrats to offer amendments to the bill. "I promised a more open process," Boehner said. "I didn't promise that every single bill was going to be an open bill."

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Those responsible will be replaced by more tea party types each election till all Rinos are gone.

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