Political opponents of former House Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay nicknamed the Texan “The Hammer” as an insult. But in one sense, it was true. When new members of his conference entered Congress, he would proceed to hammer into them the point that however one votes on a bill or a leadership contest, “thou shall not go against one’s party on a ‘rules’ vote.”
That has not been the case in the House of Representatives of the 118th Congress. The narrow Republican majority has set the record for the number of rules vote losses, at six and counting. The record-breaker came on Feb. 15 when the rule to vote for legislation to expand the federal deduction for state and local taxes, or SALT, was tanked by 18 Republicans.
Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy notched up three rules vote losses. McCarthy’s successor after his ouster last October, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), also has lost three rules votes.
In earlier times, even one rules vote defeat would have been too many. Before this Congress, in which House Republicans will hold a slender 221-214 majority when open seats are filled by special election, a rules vote had not gone against leadership since November 2002. That was just as DeLay was about to become House majority leader, after eight years as majority whip, whose sole job is to round up votes to get bills passed on the floor.
Why does this matter? The House website explains, “Consideration of a measure may be governed by a ‘rule.’ A rule is itself a simple resolution, which must be passed by the House, that sets out the particulars of debate for a specific bill — how much time will be allowed for debate, whether amendments can be offered, and other matters.”
Legislative bodies are driven by procedure as much as politics. In a practical sense, he who determines the rule governs. During normal times, the minority party does not vote for rules, while the majority passes them on its own — sure as night turns to day.
Does the failure of rules votes mean Republicans have lost control of the House of Representatives? The Washington Examiner put this question to two political scientists.
“Long ago, Will Rogers quipped, ‘I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.’ Today, a Republican member of the House of Representatives might say that,” said American Enterprise Institute political scientist Kevin Kosar, who conceded, “No, there presently is not a consistent GOP majority in the House.”
Kosar laid out the reasons for this shaky majority, citing a workaround procedure for a rules vote likely to fail. That is, bringing up a bill by “suspension of the rules,” which does just that but raises the threshold for passage of legislation to a two-thirds majority of those voting. In the past, “suspension” bills have consisted largely of post office-namings and conveyances of federal land tracts to private owners that had the support of the local House member and majority of lawmakers. Suspension wasn’t meant for key pieces of legislation such as annual federal spending bills or supplying military aid to Ukraine and Israel.
“First, the GOP margin is narrow, so it only takes a handful of party members to sink a rule and stop legislation,” Kosar said.
“Second, the change in the House’s motion to declare the chair vacant has weakened the speaker. Specifically, each time he dares to skip the Rules Committee and put a bill on the floor under suspension of the rules, he risks losing his job. So, he tries to work things through the rules but then gets sunk.”
“Third, you have a faction within the House GOP who regularly base their reelection campaigns on making big promises like, ‘We will impeach President Biden,’ and whose brand is, ‘We will never surrender.'”
Kosar believes that members of the irredentist faction “sincerely believe” in drawing this hard line and thus “vote ‘no’ on any rule or spending bill that might be viewed as a compromise.” However, given the narrow GOP majority in the House and the Democratic majority in the Senate, “these dissident party members are making legislative demands that are dead on arrival,” and this produces combustible politics.
“While most in the GOP think a shutdown is a loser, the dissident Republicans behave as if a shutdown will do no harm and will increase their leverage to get what they want,” he said.
Jeremy Mayer, a professor of political science at George Mason University, argued the Republican stumbles amount to a failure of House leadership.
“The core problem is that the most extreme wing of the GOP is holding the speaker and the party’s agenda hostage,” Mayer told the Washington Examiner, citing former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who held the gavel from 2007-2011 and 2019-2023, along with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and her clutch of far-left House members known as the “Squad.”
“When Pelosi ran her caucus, she did not have a set of caucus rules that allowed AOC and the rest of the Squad to stop her legislative plans,” Mayer said.
Mayer posed the question, “Why is the GOP’s extreme Right so powerful in the House?”
His answer: “Because the base voters in primaries are what most GOP members fear. And if they are known to be moderates, or can be portrayed as moderates, they may ignite opposition from the MAGA base.”
He added another wrinkle. Many Republicans suspect that in a game of chicken, Democrats will swerve.
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“Democrats, at the mass and elite level, are more for compromise generally,” Mayer said. “A deadlock, a government shutdown, a failed negotiation, is worse for the Democrats than the Republicans. Democrats believe in government and want it to work. More and more Republicans are anti-government at the molecular level, a level so deep it isn’t up for debate.”
Mayer added, “So yes, we don’t have a majority in the House, in the way majorities have been had by both parties for decades.”
