Rep. Louise Slaughter and Rep. Paul Ryan had a testy exchange during yesterday’s House Rules Committee debate on a GOP a bill to suspend the debt ceiling and allow the federal government to pay its bills until May 19.

The moment came about halfway into the hearing (forward to about the 30-minute mark on this link to view the whole thing) when Slaughter, who just won a tough re-election effort last November, lit in to Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman (and 2012 GOP VP nominee), for failing to include the Democrats in the process.

“We all started out where everybody’s friends,” the congresswoman said. “…I wanna be your friend. I gotta tell you, friends. I’m not sure what we’re doing here today.”

“This was filed yesterday morning at 7 o’clock on inauguration day…The fact is the Democrat Party has been totally left out of this. We keep going down the road here sort of lurching and jerking about, sort of like Plan B, leaving us out, calling us out to the Rules Committee…looking as though we really know what’s going on. We really have about had it.”

(Tha Plan B to which the congresswoman is referring is House Speaker John Boehner’s alternate fiscal cliff proposal, which he was forced to pull back late last year after it failed to pass muster with his own conference).

Slaughter later compared the situation to “Alice in Wonderland,” adding: “We keep pretending the legislative process is working, and you and I both know it is not.”

The bill in question – also known as the “no budget, no pay” legislation, passed today, 285-144.

It made it through the House thanks to 86 Democrats who voted “yes,” (including, interestingly, freshman Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, who called it a “common-sense idea”). As a result of 33 GOP defections, this measure could not have passed without Democratic assistance.

Slaughter, not surprisingly, voted “no.” Ryan voted “yes.”

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