Richard “Doc” Hastings pops his head through an old story.

Second, Hastings is responsible for the passage of the Medicare Drug Bill. In charge of timing the vote for the unpopular bill, Hastings broke the House rules, which limit voting to 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, the bill had failed, but Hastings kept the vote open for an unprecedented three more hours so the President could twist arms to pressure lawmakers to change their vote and finally to secure the bill’s narrow passage.

It makes sense, and had I not been told this but asked “Was Doc in charge of keeping time for that Medicare Bill passing?”, I’d say “Strong likelihood”. So he sat there, doing the parliamentary job of keeping time — there’s a good chance that if you click on C-SPAN’s coverage of the House proceedings, he is presiding, raising his gavel and passing out time-shares. In the case of the Medicare Re(De)form vote, that meant stretching fifteen minutes out to three hours. Doc Hastings — or, wait, I’m sorry — I mean Richard “Doc” Hastings (somewhere along the line I picked up word that his staffers are driven mad when one refers to him in that manner) is nothing if not a foot-soldier and gofer. Which means that he keeps popping up in the background of stories like this one, unnamed — following through with these technicalities.

Whose idea it was to pursue the ethics charges against Jim McDermott, I do not know. A more real case, of course, was sitting across Doc’s table — the Democratic co-chair of the Ethics Commitee who, incidentally, stepped down once the glare focused on him. What is this — simply a matter of the most entrenched Republican in Washington State’s House delegation looking at the most entrenched Democrat for Entertainment’s sake?

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