House GOP faces dilemma on spending bills

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) gave rank-and-file House Republicans a stern message during a closed-door meeting on Thursday: You asked for “regular order” and an open amendment process. Well, this is what it looks like.

An hour later, House Republicans voted down the energy and water projects spending bill in spectacular fashion after Democrats successfully attached a provision ensuring certain protections for the LGBT community.

{mosads}It marked the second time in as many weeks that a nasty fight over lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender anti-discrimination policies spilled out onto the House floor.

The 112-305 roll call on the energy bill throws into doubt the entire appropriations process for fiscal 2017 and douses fuel on a raging debate in the GOP conference over whether Ryan’s leadership team should limit amendments on future appropriations bills.

When lawmakers return from the Memorial Day recess, “we will have to get with our members and figure out how best we can move forward to have a full functioning appropriations process,” Ryan said at a press conference when The Hill asked if future spending bills would need to be more restrictive.

Republicans need to have a “family discussion,” Ryan added.

That discussion was already underway before the vote at the House GOP’s regular Thursday policy meeting in the Capitol basement. Opening the meeting with a prayer, Rep. Rick Allen (R-Ga.) read a scripture passage about homosexuality and suggested that those who vote for the LGBT provision would be committing a sin, attendees said. 

Several Republicans walked out of the room in disgust.

“There was a healthy debate about whether we should close it up and make it a structured rule, because it’s going to happen every single time,” said one lawmaker who attended the meeting. “If you don’t have a structured rule, it’s just [Democratic] mischief out there. If you always assume you will have a poison pill amendment, then you never will pass any appropriations bills.”

When he took over the speakership seven months ago, Ryan acceded to conservatives’ wishes to return the chamber to regular order, including a more freewheeling amendment process rather than stricter rules to limit amendments. But he warned at the time that more bills would go down in defeat.

“That means having more members contribute. It means more amendments from both sides of the aisle. It means fewer predetermined outcomes and, yes, more unpredictability,” Ryan said Thursday. “Early on I stood up here … and said that some bills might fail because we are not going to tightly control the process and predetermine the outcome of everything around here.

“Well, that’s what happened here today.”

But he also took aim at Democrats, whom he accused of “sabotaging” the entire appropriations process. The fact that the author of the LGBT amendment, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), voted against the underlying spending bill, was proof that Democrats were simply playing politics, he said.

“What we learned today is that Democrats weren’t looking to advance an issue. They were looking to sabotage the appropriations process,” Ryan said.

Any shift away from regular order would infuriate conservative Republicans, who had ousted Ryan’s predecessor, John Boehner (R-Ohio), largely because they felt he rigged the rules at the expense of their powers to influence legislation.

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), a leader of the far-right Freedom Caucus, rejected the notion that regular order is an impediment to Congress doing its work.

“We have regular order. This worked,” Mulvaney said just after the energy bill failed. “We got to a dead end today, [but] this is not the end of the appropriations process. This is not even the end of energy and water process. Energy and water can still come back. And my guess is that [it] will.

“It’s not the end of the process. It’s not a setback,” he added. “This is the ordinary course of business.”

Mulvaney, who opposed of the energy bill, said the amount of spending, not the LGBT amendment, was the reason for his vote.