It has long been an axiom of the House majority: Vote against a piece of legislation proposed by your party if you absolutely have to, but never vote against the “rule” of bringing that legislation to the table.
Until the last few weeks, that standard had held up for more than two decades. But now about a dozen insurgent House Republicans have decided to use their much-needed votes on the routine procedural measures to win policy concessions, violate the long-standing code of party discipline, and jeopardize the traditional workings of the House.
“Who cares?” asked Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona, one of the members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, who broke with their party over the rule last week, resulting in a very rare defeat that shut down the chamber for a week.
“I don’t care, and neither do my constituents,” he said of breaking a house standard. “Tradition be damned; we need to change the way this city works.”
But making such changes would fundamentally change the very nature of the House. Unlike the Senate, where consensus is needed to move forward on virtually anything, the House operates under strict majority rule, making party unity critical to the smooth running of business.
It could also greatly complicate speaker Kevin McCarthy’s life, with potentially disastrous consequences for the country. With a razor-thin margin of control, if all Democrats are present and vote “No,” he can afford to lose no more than four Republicans and still pass the rules needed to bring most important legislation to the table.
If the group of Republicans continued its procedural resistance, it would sow chaos for Mr McCarthy’s efforts to enact legislation, potentially upending considerations of government spending needed to avoid a shutdown this fall . Their new strategy gives the mutineers, who do not have the votes to oust Mr. McCarthy, considerable power over the Speaker and his agenda.
They were outraged by Mr. McCarthy’s deal with President Biden to suspend the debt limit and avoid a federal bankruptcy, with spending caps much higher than what House Republicans had approved.
Mr McCarthy met with the rebels on Monday and appeared to at least temporarily quell the procedural mutiny by offering new guarantees, and the House returned to work on Tuesday. But the insurgents said they had explicitly refused to promise to vote for rules in the future, and would have no problem beating them in the coming weeks if McCarthy didn’t share power with them in the way they demanded.
“Every day is a different challenge,” said Mr. McCarthy. “I just wake up every day, pray for Job’s patience and find a solution. We work ahead.”
Although little noticed by the public, house rules are fundamental to the functioning of the room. They put the agenda firmly in the hands of the majority, allowing the party in power to determine what legislation is considered and what changes can be proposed. Past speakers from both parties have made supporting the rules a strict test of party loyalty, and lawmakers would defect to them at the risk of punishment, such as losing commission posts or bottling up their legislation.
But hard-right conservatives suspicious of McCarthy’s conservative bona fides have had their sights set on the usually obscure rules process since he had to fight for his speakership in January. One of the concessions he made was an agreement to put three of the most conservative members of the House on the Rules Committee, usually an organ of the speaker.
The committee narrowly sent the debt limit legislation to the floor late last month over the objections of two Freedom Caucus members on the panel. But more than two dozen Republicans opposed the rule to consider the compromise, leading Mr. McCarthy was forced to rely on the Democrats to cross party lines and save the bill. It was an extraordinary twist that underscored the speaker’s tenuous hold on his conference and further angered conservatives.
The Democrats had no intention of helping the Republicans last week when 11 far-right conservatives opposed the rule on a political messaging bill about gas appliances that had no chance of becoming law. It was the first time a rule had been defeated since 2002, and it stunned the House, preventing Mr. McCarthy from laying bills on the floor. Lacking a governing majority as the hard right refused to budge, he sent lawmakers home for a week.
In a series of meetings after the floor riot, Mr. McCarthy and the Freedom Caucus members to find some accommodation, with the far-right Republicans demanding more of a say in determining which bills make it to the floor, especially the spending bills that are starting to pile up. form.
In an effort to appease defiant lawmakers, Representative Kay Granger, Texas Republican and the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said Monday that the panel would keep the bills below the amounts agreed to in the debt limit agreement, a position that is sure to lead to a clash with Democrats.
The situation left Democrats declaring that the speaker had handed over control of the word to what Massachusetts Representative James P. McGovern, the senior Democrat on the Rules Committee, called the far-right right-winger.
“In what world should the 11 most extreme people in the Republican Party dictate the entire agenda of a legislative body representing 332 million people?” asked Mr. McGovern.
The uproar left many other House Republicans frustrated, complaining that a handful of their colleagues were rocking the chamber and worrying about the electoral fallout in 2024. They called for calm and said they hoped that opposing rules are not so routine would become if supporting them ever were.
“This can’t be the new normal,” South Dakota Republican Rep. Dusty Johnson said. “We can’t afford to have a breakdown like this every week.”