Burning Down the House

In an audacious reworking of a cliché, a Republican member of the House of Representatives recently claimed that Freedom Caucus members' plan to rewrite the Rules of the House was intended simply to put things back the way they belonged. The FC acolyte claimed further that it was Nancy Pelosi who'd butchered regs, by radically reworking the structure under which the People's House must operate. Hard to imagine a more blatant misrepresentation; a pot calling a kettle black is not even close.

Far-right Republicans have a ravenous appetite for dragging those who disagree with them through the mud. That's the reason for the examination of House rules that is this blog.

 

House Rules and How They Evolve

We'll begin with the Rules established for the 109^th Congress, and continue forward chronologically to today. We'll start with a quick first lesson.

Numbering Congresses

Congresses and their Rules are numbered, not by anything done by the Senate (whose rules are nearly static, changing little from Congress to Congress), but rather by the number of times there'd been an incoming House of Representatives. Since that occurs every two years, some simple arithmetic will orient us. 

2005 (the year of the 109^th Congress) 

minus 1787 (the year of the first Congress) = 218

218 divided by 2 = 109

That's where we'll begin our examination.

Another easy-to-grasp point: the structure of the presentation of the Rules varies little from Congress to Congress. We've looked at all Congresses starting with the 109^th, and the Tables of Contents of each of their compilations of Rules are quite similar. As interesting is the fact that several Congresses largely adopted the Rules of their predecessor – e.g. the 112^th doing so with the rules of the 111^th. As a matter of fact, let the 112^th speak for itself: 

H. Res. 5

In the House of Representatives, U. S., January 5, 2011.

Resolved, That the Rules of the House of Representatives of the One Hundred Eleventh Congress, including applicable provisions of law or  concurrent resolution that constituted rules of the House at the end of the One Hundred Eleventh Congress, are adopted as the Rules of the House of Representatives of the One Hundred Twelfth Congress, with amendments to the standing rules

Other than font face, emphasis, and size, the citation above is completely a copy of the records of the 112^th Congress. We'll point out later how amendments like those just mentioned fit into the flowchart. But remember that, in a nutshell, whatever the number of the Congress in question, a Congress adopts, with adjustments, the rules of the immediately preceding Congress – with, for instance, the 117^th working with the rules package of the 116^th.

That's part of what makes the 118^th Congress an outlier, to say the least. This year, Republicans in the House are giddy, exuberant over taking control of that chamber. These same Republicans intend to use a combination of machete and sledge-hammer on the Rules. Their new Rules Committee has announced a summary of proposed changes. The first thing that jumped out at us? Limitations on passing increases to Federal income taxes: 

A bill or joint resolution, amendment, or conference report carrying a Federal  income tax rate increase may not be considered as passed or agreed to unless so determined by a vote of not less than three-fifths of the Members voting, a quorum (that is, the number of officers or members of a body that when assembled is legally able to transact business) being present.

Again, font characteristics are the only detail in this excerpt that do not originate with the House.

To be more complete, in the House of Representatives, a quorum can be almost whatever the leadership of the House determines it to be. The Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School cites Article 1 Section 5 Clause 1 of our Constitution, and then elaborates:

For many years the view prevailed in the House of Representatives that it was necessary for a majority of the members to vote on any proposition submitted to the House in order to satisfy the constitutional requirement for a quorum. It was a common practice for the opposition to break a quorum by refusing to vote. This was changed in 1890, by a ruling made by Speaker Reed and later embodied in Rule XV of the House, that members present in the chamber but not voting would be counted in determining the presence of a quorum. The Supreme Court upheld this rule in United States v. Ballin, saying that the capacity of the House to transact business is “created by the mere presence of a majority,” and that since the Constitution does not prescribe any method for determining the presence of such majority “it is therefore within the competency of the House to prescribe any method which shall be reasonably certain to ascertain the fact.”

Note that the last time a super-majority was called for in the House was when that body expelled James Traficant in 2002.

Any evaluation of rules changes should be able to incorporate referernces to members of the new Rules Committee. But, as of 2:45 PM EST Monday, Jan. 9, 2023, no list of members of this Committee was available. Nonetheless, actions promoted by, and voted in by, members of this Committee could endanger, if not gut, valuable programs.

We'll examine every such possibility in subsequent posts.