LAST WEEK the House of Representatives seemed to be on the verge of granting the District of Columbia a full vote in the chamber. Currently, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s delegate, has a vote in committee but no power on the floor; she cannot influence final passage of legislation. For the last few years she has worked with Virginia Republican Tom Davis toward passage of a law that would grant D.C. the voting member the city so strongly desires. In order to cut down on the partisan squabbling sure to arise since D.C. is an overwhelmingly Democratic city, the plan would also give conservative Utah an extra House member, theoretically preserving the current balance of power (at least until the next census).
Sure of victory, Democrats brought H.R. 1433, the District of Columbia Voting Rights Act of 2007, to the floor. Debate went back and forth, Republicans mostly opposed, Democrats mostly in favor–it was a typically impotent floor debate. But then something interesting happened. Republican Lamar Smith rose to offer a motion to recommit the bill to committee with instructions to include a passage that would overturn the District’s gun control laws, some of the strictest in the country. “District law threatens honest people with imprisonment if they unlock, assemble, or load their guns even under attack,” Smith said on the floor.
Democrats were caught off guard by the motion, but responded loudly in opposition, shutting down debate and denying a vote. “We heard early on that Democratic leadership had told their members they could vote any way they wanted to, they weren’t going to try and whip it, they weren’t going to try and encourage people to vote a straight party line” on the voting rights bill, Rep. Smith said in an interview. “So we thought, that’s wonderful, we’re going to win this motion to recommit. And then, totally unexpectedly, they pulled the bill and didn’t allow a vote.”
Davis knows why the Democratic leadership didn’t want a vote. “Instead of recommitting and returning to the floor forthwith, using it as an amendment,” Davis explains, “they did a motion to recommit to send it back to the committee.” As Davis said on the floor during the debate, doing so “kills the bill, and that is the intention of this.”
“I think, in fairness, it’s less directed at D.C. then it is just at frustration in not having any open bills,” Davis told me. Other Republicans agreed with his theory. “It’s interesting to me that the media, who was so exercised about Republicans not offering Democrats more opportunities for amendments, have been strangely silent when the Democrats have been far more strict than we ever were about open and fair debate” said Smith. When I asked one Republican leadership aide about the Democratic plans to bring the bill up again under closed rules, thus stifling Republican plans to derail it again procedurally, he called this “the nuclear option,” adding that giving “Republicans zero bites at the apple, not one, would be unprecedented. You might as well not have a minority party. Obviously the hypocrisy is clear.”
DEMOCRATS DISAGREE. Having chafed under Republican rule for over a decade, the Democrats promised a more open and fair procedure and have, for the most part, been better than Republicans were during their final years in power. As one Democratic aide on the Rules Committee explained, “thus far in the 110th Congress, the Democratic-led Rules Committee has . . . passed four open rules so far this Congress, compared with three open rules for all of the last Congress (appropriations bills excluded).” The committee’s chairwoman, Rep. Louise Slaughter, adds “our record speaks for itself. I’m very proud that we have already had more openness in the Rules Committee in two months than Republicans had in the last two years.” A 2005 study of the recent Republican-led Congresses compiled by Democrats on the Rules Committee found that “Republicans criticized Democrats for limiting debate on 43 percent of bills sent to the House floor since 1987, but they limited debate a stunning 84 percent” of the time.
In the report, American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein is quoted as having written in 2003 “if Democrats, when they were in the House majority, jammed through plenty of bills without Republican participation and turned off the moderate Members of the minority, their highhandedness was nothing compared to what House Republicans are doing now.” In a later column, Ornstein described the parliamentary techniques used to stifle debate as “the middle finger approach to governing.” Asked to judge the Democratic House thus far in terms of openness, Ornstein’s response was mixed. So far, Democrats have not done “terribly well,” he said, adding that “cumulatively it’s going to be not only damaging to a fair and open process, but frankly, it’s counterproductive for a party trying to stay in the majority.”
The Republicans are not blameless, however. “A minority party has responsibilities too, if they want an open process,” Ornstein said. “If you have an open amendment process and then you have a bunch of amendments put forward that are basically designed not to offer real alternatives but as gotcha amendments designed to basically trigger 30 second attack ads against vulnerable members, it’s almost going to be a guarantee that you’re going to get a shut-down or a slow-down on that process.”
As Davis pointed out on the floor, that’s exactly what the Republican leadership was trying to do with Smith’s motion to recommit. The amendment was “put there to put Members in a difficult situation . . . this kills the bill,” Davis said. He voted against the rule closing debate on the bill, and echoed his Republican colleagues’ frustration when he told me “we ought to have a full debate on this. People ought to be able to weigh in.” But Davis hopes that procedural maneuvering will not get in the way when the bill comes up again in a couple of weeks: “The basic issue is, should D.C. residents, as the capitol of the free world, should they have the right to vote, and have a vote only in the House? That’s the question.”
Sonny Bunch is assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
