"Miller's Moment": Nice piece about Rep. George Miller gettin' it done.

[laststeamtrain]

Miller's Moment
By Garance Franke-Ruta, The American Prospect
Posted on January 4, 2006, Printed on January 5, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/30349/
In a year marked by Democrats' increasingly audacious push-back against Republicans, one move stood out for its legislative moxie and for the very public defeat it dealt the president.

Nine days after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf, George W. Bush suspended the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, a law Republicans have wanted to do away with for decades. The law requires federal contractors to pay workers the prevailing wage in the community where they work, and it would have ensured that companies like Halliburton that were tasked with doing post-hurricane clean-up work couldn't reduce wages offered to the newly destitute citizens of Louisiana and Mississippi.

Democrats complained, but they didn't do anything -- until a month and a half later, when George Miller, a little-heralded California congressman, used an obscure provision of a 1976 law to force Bush to reverse course. The law, the National Emergency Act, was the Watergate-era product of Senate concerns about Richard Nixon's imperial presidency, and it reclaimed for Congress power to countermand the president's authority to declare a national emergency and suspend laws.

By introducing a joint congressional resolution to terminate a president's emergency declaration, a legislator could be guaranteed a fast-track vote on it, and restore any laws whose suspension Congress did not support.
http://www.alternet.org/story/30349