We recently ran an opinion piece by Robert Palmer arguing that the rules changes in the House of Representatives for the 118th Congress, which came about due to a change in party control and a tumultuous speaker election, would help Congress become more productive and accountable. To keep our content informative, interesting, and engaging, I’ve penned a good faith rebuttal (or, in Hamiltonian fashion… a series of rebuttals) to that opinion piece, arguing that the way the House of Representatives operated until this Congress is both practical and pragmatic, and that the further proposed changes would go against the best interests of both the chamber and the public. 

Don’t Credit McCarthy With the New House Rules | The Illusion of the “Empty” Congress | Members of Congress Have a Hard Job, Their Work Ethic is Just Fine

My biggest gripe with Robert’s argument was that it credits newly-crowned Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy with the supposedly positive changes in the 118th Congress. Sure, McCarthy eventually agreed to these changes in order to secure the gavel – but it was clear in the month leading up to his election as speaker that he was not exactly happy to make these changes. 

It was the Freedom Caucus that pushed the rule limiting House bills to a single subject – a rule that lacks any teeth or enforcement mechanism, and which is of dubious value. What is inherently wrong with a bill that is the result of negotiation and compromise that provides a vulnerable Nevada Democrat with water reuse legislation and a vulnerable Virginia Republican with improved military benefits? Is that not the ideal kind of congressional compromise we naively think of? Is there something wrong with a process that allows members of both parties to trade and exchange ideas in order to secure mutual wins for their districts?

The rule requiring that the text of a bill must be released at least 72 hours before a floor vote was put in place by Democrats to begin with (although in practice they frequently waived it), and the new rules package contained no additional provision to enforce this requirement. I’m not going to die on a hill over this one (suffice it to say there should probably be exceptions for national emergencies requiring an immediate response… like say, raising the debt ceiling if we get too close to default), but given that there appears to be no method to enforce this, it is – at best – a moot point. 

Of course, there’s also the rule McCarthy fought the hardest – the one that makes it possible for a single member to force a vote to “vacate the chair” and remove the speaker. There’s precedent for this rule, but after the frought speakership of Republican John Boehner (in which the Freedom Caucus of yore held the motion to vacate over his head to extract concessions), Democrats changed the rules when they took control of the House. McCarthy – witness to the downfall of Boehner and the absolutism of the Freedom Caucus – was desperate to keep the threshold to force a motion to vacate higher than one vote, lest his speakership meet a similar fate. This was the core reason that McCarthy went 15 rounds in the speaker election, but he ultimately capitulated, restoring the one vote threshold. As evinced by his razor-thin election as speaker, McCarthy can’t afford to upset more than a handful of his conference, and one alone could make things very uncomfortable for him.

The fact that McCarthy attempted to brush aside and then put up a fight against these purportedly sound rules changes matters, and it’ll be a throughline across these pieces. McCarthy is a creature of the House, and his instincts for how to most successfully run a Republican majority are worth understanding. The opposing opinion piece vouched for the changes McCarthy opposed but ultimately gave in on, and then espoused the need to go further. But I ask you to take note of his hesitancy to do either, why he still has not gone as far as some wish, and why nearly all Republicans and Democrats are not looking to go much further. Maybe there’s a good reason why Congress works the way it does.