House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to rewrite House rules today to ensure that the Republican minority is unable to have any influence on legislation.

Pelosi’s proposals are so draconian,” basically she’s going to get rid of all of the rules that the Gingrich House came up with.

“Pelosi’s rule changes — which may be voted on Tuesday– will reverse the fairness rules that were written around Newt Gingrich’s ‘Contract with America.'”

If she gets her way, Republicans will not be able to offer alternative bills. Republicans will not be able to offer amendments to Democrat bills. They will not even be offered the guarantee of open debate accessible by motions to recommit for any piece of legislation during the entire 111th Congress.

Nancy Pelosi is effectively going to shut ’em out. This is from Nancy Pelosi, by the way, who after the 2006 victories was talking about the new bipartisanship, the new transparency, the new openness and all this sort of stuff.

Now the Stalinist tactics are coming into play, and it will be interesting to see how the Republicans deal with this

If you want to get depressed, I will admit, there are reasons to get depressed and angry out there, there’s no question about it, but elections have consequences, and depression isn’t going to accomplish anything.

Action is. And the next set of elections is 2010.