Quote for the Day: Rep. Ross on Health Care, Legislating

From the transcript of Lois Romano’s interview with the Congressman for the WaPo, these remarks can be found a little more than halfway down the Web page:

… our forefathers never envisioned that a handful of staff write a bill and you rush it through a committee without reading it and you rush it to the floor without reading it, and you pass it just because you’re a Democrat and Democrats told you to do that. I mean, that was not what our founding fathers envisioned, and that’s what we’re trying to do here, the seven of us that stood up on the Committee and said, we’re for healthcare reform but we don’t want to do it this way; we want to slow down.

That’s really–you know, if you take healthcare reform out of it, it could have been any issue. The message was that we want to be involved in helping draft and write legislation and we want to have time to read it and we want to have time to discuss it with our constituents, who send us here to be their voice.

As I’ve noted before, I cannot be entirely objective on Congressman Ross. In contrast, I know that — when he finds the courage (audacity) to be as fiscally conservative as Blue Dogs claim to be — Ross infuriates some of our readers and (I suspect) some of our writers, who lean much further left than I do. But regardless of our respective biases or inclinations, can any of us reasonably disagree with what Ross is quoted as saying, above? Perhaps hyperpartisans can take exception to or find fault in these words, but I’ve never considered hyperpartisans “reasonable.”

In at least one respect, Ross’ remarks echo the past (and perhaps present) thinking of Congressman Phil Hare, who (by the way) does not entirely agree with Ross on health reform. Here’s what Congressman Hare said to me more than two years ago, when we chatted on a plane ride back to St. Louis from DC …

[Hare] gets frustrated when he walks into the Chamber and a Party colleague asks, “How are we voting on this one?”

“They’re looking for the Party line and I always want to ask them, ‘Shouldn’t you read the bill for yourself, or at least have your staff brief you on it, so you can make up your own mind?’” he said.

Elected officials who approach issues independently, not on party lines. Argue with me if you want to — and some of you surely want to — but I remain convinced we need more of this independence, more of this party bucking, not less.