Miller's Moment

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.

Signed into law by President Gerald Ford, the provision had lain dormant for 29 years, forgotten until Miller found it was uniquely suited to our present era of imperial and imperious presidential action. Miller knew that he had enough support from labor-friendly (or labor-fearful) Republicans that the suspension of Davis-Bacon would be voted down in Congress once the Emergency Act's trigger allowed the open vote that the Republican leadership was refusing to hold. Bush quickly realized the same thing and decided to spare himself the humiliation. Within two weeks of Miller's action, Bush reinstated Davis-Bacon. Labor leaders cheered, and Democrats across the country perked up at the sight of the president outfoxed. But for Miller, it was just another day at the office.

George Miller is the most important Democratic tactician you've never heard of. In the past year, there has been precisely one lengthy profile of him inside Washington, and none in any of the major national papers. And yet, in an environment where Democrats have been almost wholly stymied by the Republicans' iron grip on power, Miller has repeatedly come up with innovative ways to defend progressive interests. "They have so corrupted the rules of the House of Representatives that you essentially have to engage in guerilla activity to try … to get a vote on a matter," says Miller, who has become expert in the range of alternatives available during this time of one-party rule. "We've just tried to be as creative as we possibly could be."

When Republicans refused to conduct congressional oversight hearings, Miller requested agency inspector-general investigations into Department of Education funding of propaganda in American newspapers, and into a highly unusual agreement between Wal-Mart and the Department of Labor. He pioneered the first ever "e-hearing" when he couldn't get his committee to hold an official one on the attempt by United Airlines to default on its pension obligations.

Then, he parlayed the more than 2,000 letters he got from United employees through that e-hearing into Republican votes on a later amendment, which passed the House (though not the Senate), backing the employees.

He even managed, in 2004, to use a simple Republican failure to formally dismiss a conference committee to force a vote on an amendment -- attached to a bill that had been abandoned! -- dealing with onerous new overtime rules, thereby forcing Republicans into an on-the-record vote on the issue. "He's a legislator, not a press hound," says his California colleague Howard Berman with admiration. "He isn't doing things for the purpose of getting known, he's doing things for the purpose of having an impact."