[ad_1]
House Leadership Candidates Rule of Thumb: The Issues You Shouldn’t Totally Succumb To Deniers In The Caucuses.
All of this came to me last week while watching the messy food battle on the House floor that stretched the new Parliament’s normal opening day into a four-day slow grind. The party’s resistance to electing his party’s nominee, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (California Republican), was the cause.
In 11 ballots over three days, McCarthy held just 200 votes to face Democratic nominee Hakeem Jeffries (NY), who consistently won all 212 caucus votes. Finally, late Friday night, by the 14th ballot, McCarthy managed to get 16 more votes from the hard-line “never Kevin” crowd, but was still one vote short of winning the majority. Absent.
After the postponed ballot was overturned (before the final results were announced), McCarthy won on the 15th ballot after midnight. He was then sworn in, sworn in by the other members, and gave a generous acceptance speech reaching out to dissenters on both sides of the aisle and downtown.
One of the major concessions McCarthy made to the members of the Freedom Caucus was to allow one member to submit privileged resolutions from the floor to “free the chair” (Speakership). Earlier, Republicans released a proposed package of House rules. This included a change that any motion to leave would require the support of her five members of Congress.
This was a big leap from the rule the Democrats enacted four years ago, which said that such resolutions could only be brought to the floor at the direction of the party caucus or a majority of the meeting. Moving to a single-member motion to leave for immediate floor action would restore pre-2019 House rules.
Some have expressed concern that lowering the threshold could lead to repeated votes on motions to leave if either party is offended by the speaker’s actions. Proponents of the latest iteration argue that they are wise and do not abuse privilege by offering a cascading movement of evictions. can not.
Such a motion to resign has only been attempted twice in the history of the House. The first was in March 1910, after Speaker of the House Joseph (“Uncle Joe”) Cannon was removed as chairman and member of the Rules Committee. The rebellion against “canonism” (aka “The Emperor’s Speaker”) saw a group of progressive Republicans working with the Democrats to change the rules of the House floor, freeing Cannon from his seat on the committee and leaving the Committee on Rules. We succeeded when we scaled it up. An elected member of the House of Representatives.
Cannon, who was still chairman at the time, invited his opponents to terminate him with a privileged motion to vacate the chairmanship. One Democrat willingly accepted his challenge and motioned to remove the Speaker. threw
The second such motion was attempted in July 2015, when Rep. It was when I submitted a resolution to vacate the But the motion was worded in such a way that it was not prerogative for floor consideration, but instead referred to the Rules Committee.
Mr Meadows said Mr Boehner’s actions, which had angered his hardline conservative colleagues, were simply an attempt to facilitate “family discussions” at the convention. This threat was enough to cause Boehner to resign from his seat in the House of Representatives in his September, two months after he did.
His successor, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), did not get along with his far-right critics. He retired at the end of his 2018 115th Congress.
A final rule of thumb: A good alternative to what many perceived as former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (Democrat, California) hard-and-fast rule is not to tie your hands behind Congressmen’s backs, but instead A strong, even-handed chair is committed to a more open, methodical, and deliberative legislative process.
Don Wolfensberger is a Congressional Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, former Staff Director of the House Rules Committee, and author of Changing Cultures in Congress: From Fair Play to Power Plays. The views expressed are solely his own.
[ad_2]
Source link
