Those House Rule Changes Lasted Four Months

Debt Limit Bill Defies Touted Rule Changes Conservatives Wanted, and They're Fine With That

The House is voting on their debt limit and spending cut package—the Limit, Save, Grow Act, H.R. 2811—right now. The vote will likely be completed by the time I hit publish, but what’s in the bill really isn’t the point of this post. The point of the post is process, more than anything else.

Still, as a matter of making sure it’s mentioned, the Limit, Save, Grow Act ended up being more expansive than media reports initially suggested. The Congressional Budget Office originally scored the bill as reducing the budget deficit by $4.2 trillion over ten years. Relative to the baseline, deficits would be around $16 trillion over the ten-year budget window if the legislation were to pass rather than $20.2 trillion, or about 20 percent less. Got it? Cool.

We heard a lot about process at the beginning of the new Congress. You may remember that the House Freedom Caucus and some of its allies talked about rule changes that would allow the House to function the way it was intended. They wanted the process to be less controlled by leadership and more by the rank-and-file. “Regular order” was the line. Hey, I get it. Whichever party has the majority, it doesn’t really matter, bills got brought to the floor that didn’t go through the committee process and weren’t open for amendment. This was the entire reason that the House went through so many rounds to elect a Speaker.

The rule changes that the House Freedom Caucus agitated for at the beginning of the Congress were supposed to bring a new day. Well, here we are. With this the Limit, Save, Grow Act, the committees that should’ve been involved were at least Budget, Judiciary, Ways and Means, and Energy and Commerce. The House is voting on this consequential bill, and there weren’t any hearings or markups in the committees of jurisdiction.

The rules state that legislation has to be posted online 72 hours before it’s considered by the House. This was a rule change the House Freedom Caucus touted as a win. The text of the bill was posted online on Tuesday. The bill was amended in the House Rules Committee in the wee hours of Wednesday morning to win over support from wayward Republicans. The bill got a vote on the House floor on the same day because Rules waived all points of order. So, the 72-hour rule was ignored for political convenience.

The House Freedom Caucus wanted more amendments to legislation, but Rules brought the Limit, Save, Grow Act to the floor under a closed rule—meaning no proposed amendments could be considered from the floor.

On the policy side, apart from the games being played with the debt limit, I have no objection to the policies being pushed in this bill by the House Republican Conference. At least, nothing immediately comes to mind. In fact, I support most, if not all of the policies in the bill. But this is consequential legislation at least in terms of what it addresses. No hearing. No markup. No amendments. Those much-touted rule changes for which the House Freedom Caucus and its allies fought lasted four months.