Members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus are planning to make parliamentary delay tactics and protest maneuvers a regular feature on the House floor.
In doing so, conservative members aim to take a principled stand to make Democrats pay for what they call crippling the minority, with the hopes of having a measurable aggregate effect on keeping Democratic bills off the floor or even forcing Democrats to make rules concessions.
“Frankly, it is our job to slow down the majority,” Rep. Andy Biggs, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus and an Arizona Republican, told the Washington Examiner, adding the procedural moves could have a “measurable” victory.
“If they’re going to get 100 bad bills through, and because you’ve engaged in the process enough to slow down, so they only get 50, 60, 70 bills through, you’ve had a measurable, substantive victory because you’ve slowed down and stopped what they’re doing,” Biggs said. “That’s really the strategy.”
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Chief among those tactics could be forcing roll call votes on “suspension” bills — typically noncontroversial proposals that have a fast-track to the House floor under suspension of the rules while bypassing the House Rules Committee. But the bills require more than two-thirds support in the House to be brought to the floor and are often passed by voice vote.
Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy told the Washington Examiner that some of those allegedly noncontroversial bills are “actually affirmatively harmful.” He pointed to a bill that reformed child abuse prevention laws, which some activists thought raised due process problems. After forcing a roll call vote, 73 Republicans voted against it.
As for the truly unobjectionable bills such as naming post offices, Roy said that “those can wait” until after Congress deals with larger issues, such as the U.S.-Mexico border migration surge.
The conservative members were already successful in delaying bills on the suspension calendar. After threatening to force stand-alone votes on all 13 suspension bills slated for the evening of March 8, a process that would have taken around 10 hours, Democrats pulled them from the floor schedule.
Some of those were rescheduled to allow time for roll call votes, including a bill to give Congressional Gold Medals to the police officers who assisted in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol building. Thirteen Republicans voted against it over objections to the term “insurrection” and describing the Capitol as a “temple.”
Delay tactics have more of a bite under pandemic-era House rules, which allow for 40 minutes per vote to accommodate social distancing.
“We don’t have regular order. We don’t have minority rights. And this is our remaining tactic that we can use to make the speaker understand that, basically, you just cannot function a legislative body this way,” said Montana Republican Rep. Matt Rosendale, a freshman member of the House.
Republicans point to many ways that Democrats have neutered the minority party and normal workings of the House, and some conservative members hope that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be willing to negotiate on those if she becomes frustrated enough by the delays.
“I believe we ought to get something significant out of Democrats as any kind of a concession for regular order in the floor actually working,” Roy said.
In this year’s new rules package, Democrats gutted the motion to recommit, a tool that Republicans used to add last-minute amendments to legislation. Legislation that passed the House in the previous Congress was also allowed to bypass committee markup until April 1, preventing new members from adding input on the bills.
Democrats also forced a floor vote to remove a member from the minority party from her committee assignments — Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose past support for conspiracy theories and inflammatory remarks resurfaced soon after she was sworn in.
Republicans are also upset about Pelosi’s directive to put metal detectors by the entrances to the House floor, remaining fencing outside of the Capitol building, and the continued, indefinite use of proxy voting, a practice that many argue is unconstitutional, despite at least 75% of House members being vaccinated.
“You have to do some things to get us to not inconvenience you anymore,” Biggs said. Democrats “have to give us back the motion to reconsider.”
Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters earlier this month that he had spoken to Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy about the confrontations on suspensions, saying: “If this continues, we’ll have to deal with it.”
However, not everyone in the Republican conference supports continued delay tactics. Suspension bills are also one of the main ways that the minority party pushes through its own legislation.
Greene, with no committee work to do, has made multiple surprise motions to adjourn as a short-term delay tactic in protest of legislation such as the Equality Act, forcing members to leave daytime meetings and head to the floor to vote. Republicans have increasingly broken against Greene’s motion.
“I get it. It may be inconvenient,” Biggs said, adding that the timing of one of Greene’s motions forced him to cancel a scheduled television interview.
“You got establishment people saying, ‘Oh no, if you do this, they’re just gonna jam this all through by rule.’ OK. Jam it through by rule,” Roy said.
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Aside from forcing roll call votes on suspension bills and the motion to adjourn, Biggs did not reveal what other procedural tactics might be used to slow down the Democratic agenda, but he did suggest delay tactics similar could also be used in committees.
“Let them have a moment or two of surprise,” Biggs said.
