This would seem to be an unprecedented move towards undermining rule of law and process.

An outrage was committed on the House floor tonight. I still can't quite believe what happened.

While voting on a motion to recommit for the agricultural appropriations legislation, the presiding chair (who is a Democrat member) gaveled the vote closed. The tally was clear and the vote was over. The Republicans had won. Then, realizing what had happened - the Dems allowed just their people to keep voting to change the result. Let's be clear, this wasn't holding the vote open - they changed the results of a vote that was legally declared over.

Powerline links to Politico, where Patrick O'Connor says that Democrats then erased the record that the vote ever occurred! Holy subterfuge! What next? Removing those who disagree with them from office on a pretext of trumped-up charges?

Oh, sorry, that's not "next", that's happened already. But when the implausible case against Tom DeLay ("R-Sugar Land") was thrown out (by an "all-Republican Court of Criminal Appeals"), Texas State Prosecuting Attorney Jeffrey Van Horn (who, strangely, has no apparent political party affiliation whatsoever!) "filed a friend of the court brief saying the court erred in not upholding a conspiracy indictment against DeLay."

No, no push to rewrite the rules here, either:

The Court of Criminal Appeals in a 5-4 ruling in June refused to reverse a district judge's decision to throw out an indictment against DeLay alleging conspiracy to violate the Election Code.

To rule against DeLay would have required the court to overturn decisions that had been issued in 1976 and 1977 regarding how the state's conspiracy law applied to other statutes.

Though this article does (obliquely) mention that the rule DeLay violated was created a year after the fund transfer in question, the doesn't mention that the practice in question was used by both Democrats and Republicans. Nor do we hear any details as to why Ronnie Earl's indictment violated court rulings regarding the proper use of conspiracy charges.

All it takes for this kind of bad behavior to succeed is a group of officials willing to bend or even break the rules, and a press who doggedly won't inform us about the most pertinent information. Are these a series of unrelated incidents, or the just the tip of a trend which will further undermine the basic rule of law in our soon-to-be-former Republic?

I hope for the former -- and hope that the press will cover this most recent incident (though they'll probably be forced to do it by "right wing talk", and will be covered as a spat, treating the facts as mere allegations), and that a few decent people on the other side will show their outrage. But the lack of public comprehension on the DeLay indictment doesn't bode well.

All I can say is that it's a good thing DeLay didn't also slap someone's butt, or he'd be facing down felony assault charges and a decade or more behind bars.

Update: Apparently, erasing the record of failed votes has already become a "maddening and familiar pattern in the Democrat-controlled Assembly" of the state of California. Yet the above is an example of erasing a vote which passed.

Update 2: Malkin is on it. And she's attractive and fiery enough to get camera time (on Fox anyway), which means this is probably get some attention.

After a majority of the House initially passed the measure barring illegal immigrants from receiving taxpayer funded handouts, Democrat leaders stepped-in to strong-arm their politically vulnerable members into switching their votes in order to defeat the measure and deliver benefits for illegals.

Unfortunately for those Democrats who switched their votes, their actions were caught on tape.