June 23, 2016. Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives can’t accomplish anything. What to do? “Let’s have a sit-in, like we used to do in the Dean’s office!” They don’t seem to know that they are supposed to be the grown-ups.

The tactics of the Occupy movement are the ones the House Democrats have brought to bear. Of course, the whole purpose of the Occupy movement is to bring to big city financial districts the rabble that doesn’t belong there. Exactly.

As a body of 435 voting members the House must operate under rules governing the order of action on legislation. These rules were not invented by the current Republican majority. They were in place during the 60 years that the Democrats controlled the House before 1994. They were adopted again more recently when the Democrats were the majority earlier in the Obama administration.

The rules are familiar to everyone who ever took a high school Civics class. A bill is introduced, goes to a committee for consideration and goes to the House floor for debate and a vote only if it gets a majority vote in the committee. The gun bill in question did get a vote in committee and was defeated.

If members not on the committee feel a bill was wrongly held or defeated in committee, a petition signed by 218 members, a bare majority, will bring it to the floor for a vote. That has not been done or even tried here.

Contrary to appearances, the House Democrats aren’t really retread hippies. They know the House is an institution that operates on majority rule. Their true purpose is the one that guides all actions of all members of both Houses of Congress – not accomplishing anything but raising money and playing to their culture warriors. Already fund-raising appeals have gone out with video of the “sit-in.”

The hypocrisy of the Democrats’ pretended belief in having a vote was demonstrated in the smaller US Senate where they blocked a vote on the Republicans proposal to block gun sales to persons on the “No Fly” list for 3 days with notice to the FBI which could extend the ban. The Democrats didn’t vote against the gun bill; they voted nearly unanimously against letting the bill come to a vote.

Still wondering if the Democrats would prefer having an issue to an accompliment?