On Wednesday, while members of the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections were holding a hearing about mine safety, GOP Rep. Charles Norwood decided he'd had enough. With a full thirty minutes remaining within the scheduled time frame for the hearing, Norwood, the chairman of the subcommittee, simply shut down the hearing. The AFL-CIO blog has more:

After witnesses from MSHA, the mining industry and the Mine Workers (UMWA Safety Director Dennis O'Dell) had testified, Norwood refused to allow Miller to continue his questioning of the witnesses.

According to House rules, Miller had allotted time for the questions and the scheduled two-hour hearing had another 30 minutes to run when Norwood shut it down.

"So far this year, 21 coal miners have died in the United States," says Miller. "This is a crisis. Yet Republican leaders in Congress were unwilling to devote more than a mere 90 minutes to this issue of life and death. Congress has a responsibility to take action to keep more people from dying in preventable mine accidents. The Republicans showed a complete lack of concern and respect for miners and their families by shutting down this hearing before all the facts could come out."

Less than a month ago, the Republican leadership in the House was flat out refusing to hold hearings of any kind on mine safety. Rep. Miller and other House Democrats were forced to hold their own unofficial forum on the topic just to draw attention to it. And now that the Democrats have been allowed to hold a hearing, the Republicans use their bullying power as the majority party to shut it down prematurely. But it's no wonder Congressional Republicans don't want serious questions answered about mine safety. After all, they have a President to protect.

Beyond the mine safety issue, this seems like it's part of a growing anti-democratic trend for the Republicans. I know what you're thinking -- when did the Republicans ever conduct business democratically? But it seems that their efforts lately have been at least somewhat uncharacteristically sloppy. Take as one example Republican efforts to smother Rep. Louise Slaughter's report on Congressional ethics, "America for Sale: The Cost of Republican Corruption". Rather than ignoring it, as one would do in a position of strength, the Republicans strangely called attention to it by making the bizarre and baseless claim that reporting on corruption somehow constitutes an ethics violation.

I have trouble believing that the Republicans are incapable of recognizing the visuals here. These blatant attempts to stifle dissent feed so easily into the Democratic narrative that the Republicans are dishonest and corrupt. And yet they just keep doing it. If there's any bright side to this kind of official bullying, it's that the Republicans are acting very much like they realize that their control of Washington is rapidly coming to an end.