There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when House members were drilled by their leaders at the beginning of a new Congress on three unwritten party rules they were expected obey without exception. First, always vote for your party’s nominee for Speaker; second, always support your party’s package of House rules proposed at the opening of a Congress; and, third, always vote for your party’s position on special rule resolutions from the Rules Committee that set the terms of debate and amendment on major legislation. The Rules Committee was known then, at least, as “the Speaker’s committee” because it reflected the leadership’s policy priorities and procedural means of considering them.
For a small group of hard-right junior Republicans, all three of those rules were tossed out of the window as the beginning of this 118th Congress. They first balked at electing Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as Speaker over the course of four days and 14 ballots until they had wrested from him certain concessions on House rules changes and processes they wanted him to adhere to.
Then, later in the first session, with help from minority Democrats, they adopted “a motion to vacate the chair (oust him as Speaker) because he had gone back on one of his earlier pledges to them. That was followed by several days of trying to elect a new Speaker. After rejecting on the House floor four prominent candidates nominated by the GOP conference over two weeks, they finally succeeded with fourth-term Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.).
The third and final rule the rebel band-of-bothers defied was on supporting special rules from the House Rules Committee. Beginning in June 2023 through February 2024, six special rules have been rejected, including two for consideration of the defense appropriations bill. Another rule, providing for a continuing appropriations resolution was withdrawn before it could be defeated and resurrected under a suspension process.The far-right coterie had figured out that you only need a handful of majority members to defeat a rule since all Democrats routinely vote against the rules resolutions. Of the six defeated rules, the average number of Republican “no” votes was 12, but two of them were defeated with just five and six GOP votes, respectively.
To respond to this new procedural barricade in the road, the majority leadership switched to use the suspension process instead. That process limits debate to 40 minutes, allows for no amendments, and requires a two-thirds vote for passage. But, to pull this off with major bills, that meant reshaping the bills to gain support from most of minority Democrats — something that infuriated the extreme conservative crowd. There was a time when such agreements were praised as bipartisan compromises — the essence of congressional politics and accomplishments. But, to today’s far-right members it’s amounts to consorting with the enemy — akin to treason in modern partisan parlance.
That’s not only what brought Speaker McCarthy down but what daily faces current Speaker Johnson as voices within his party threaten to offer another motion to vacate the chair as he attempts to salvage urgently needed legislation just to keep the government functioning. All three of the enacted continuing appropriations resolutions (CRs) have been passed under suspension in the House, with the current one set to expire on March 1.
In addition, the “Fiscal Responsibility Act,” which set overall spending caps and avoided a default on the debt, was initially passed by the House on May 31, 2023, under the terms of a special rule adopted that same day, 241-187, with 29 Republicans in opposition. But that was the House-Senate compromise that led to Speaker McCarthy’s ouster.
In grappling for an appropriate analogy for this new procedural game in town, I finally settled on circle dodgeball, labeled here as “procedural dodgeball.” A large circle is drawn and, in the middle a smaller circle with five or so targets (or leaders). Around the perimeter are 20 or so throwers (rebels) on marked spots who try to eliminate the players in the middle by hitting them below the waist with dodge balls. Once all the center circle targets are eliminated, they switch places with a comparable number of throwers in the inner circle until they in turn are all removed. And back and forth it goes, between special rules and the suspension bills.
Unfortunately, all the players on the inner and outer circles are of the same party. The Democrats, on the other hand, are in the stands, cheering on both sides in their game of self-elimination, while providing sufficient votes on special rules to allow the handful of rebels to prevail in defeating those rules.
It’s difficult to predict when or whether all this will end. But it is a far cry from James Madison’s ideal of a Congress in which various competing factions overcome their hostilities and finally come together to act in the public interest after extended deliberations over the nature of the problems and its solution. Deliberation today is in short supply. Performative, partisan point-making has replaced serious national lawmaking as the order of the day.
Don Wolfensberger is a 28-year congressional staff veteran and former chief of staff of the House Rules Committee. He is author of “Congress and the People: Deliberative Democracy on Trial” (2000), and, “Changing Cultures in Congress: from Fair Play to Power Plays” (2018). The views expressed are solely his own.