Democrats Play House

WaPo reported In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe.

It was not a long trip. Most of them live there, so it was just a trip home.

They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official.Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him "Mr. Chairman."

I guess that is better than leotards with a cape and a big "S" on his chest.

He liked that so much that he started calling himself "the chairman" and spouted other chairmanly phrases, such as "unanimous consent" and "without objection so ordered." The dress-up game looked realistic enough on C-SPAN, so two dozen more Democrats came downstairs to play along....Conyers was having so much fun that he ignored aides' entreaties to end the session. "At the next hearing," he told his colleagues, "we could use a little subpoena power." That brought the house down. As Conyers and his hearty band of playmates know, subpoena power and other perks of a real committee are but a fantasy unless Democrats can regain the majority in the House. But that's only one of the obstacles they're up against as they try to convince America that the "Downing Street Memo" is important.