New House Rules
They're Better Than What the Media Claims
Minutes after midnight last Friday, Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA-20) received a majority of House votes making him the next Speaker.
It took several votes over three days for McCarthy to get over the hump. He made several concessions to approximately 20 Republican hold-outs in order to secure enough votes.
Countless observers, especially the media, criticized the concessions made by McCarthy using terms such as “right-wing nuts,” “extreme,” “dysfunction,” and “devastating.” Ironically, most of these concessions were restoring to the House policies that had been in effect for decades until recently.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect to the past week was the near-agreement by congressmen on both sides of the aisle that party leadership should never be questioned or challenged by rank-and-file members. They should silently obey. This may be why most of the public think Republicans and Democrats equally comprise the DC swamp.
Some of the concessions that have been highly criticized underscore just how dysfunctional the nation’s capital has become in recent years. Other concessions appear to reflect the will of a sizable plurality, and possibly a majority, of US voters.
According to published reports, some of the concessions made by McCarthy include:
• A floor vote to establish term limits for House members.
• An open amendment process that would allow all 435 House members to offer an amendment to a bill, as had been the norm for much of the history of Congress.
• Allowing lawmakers a minimum of 72-hours to read bills before voting on them.
• Agreement to vote individually on all 12 stand-alone appropriation bills as had occurred for decades rather than a single, multi-thousand page omnibus spending bill that escapes scrutiny, as has become the routine in recent years.
• Restraining spending levels. The national debt was $5.7 trillion in 2001. Today, it is $31 trillion. And climbing.
• Establishing a select subcommittee to investigate the personal privacy information that government has been collecting on citizens.
All of these concessions are topics that most of the public agrees with. Those who oppose many of these moves include politicians, lobbyists, government bureaucrats, and the media.
Let’s consider just a few of these potential changes.
According to polling, 4 of 5 Americans want term limits for federal lawmakers. Americans may have grown tired with elected officials who appear to have suffered severe mental cognitive decline but are still holding office. Or they legitimately wonder how politicians of modest means enter Congress with no savings and sizable debt to later leave office as multi-millionaires on an annual salary of just $174,000.
Voters elect their member of Congress to represent the interests of their district. In recent years, rank-and-file members have been cut out of the process of introducing, amending, debating, compromising, deliberating, and voting on measures. The routine since 2016 has been to introduce massive bills, filled with unrelated provisions, without floor amendments permitted, that face an up-or-down vote along party lines. Single topic bills have become virtually non-existent.
How could anyone oppose allowing members to actually read all bills at least three days before they are voted upon? The recently passed $1.7 trillion spending package was 4,155 pages long. This is the problem in a nutshell.
You would be hard-pressed to find members of the general public who oppose greater spending accountability. It’s been two decades since Congress passed all 12 appropriation measures as stand-alone bills. In fact, this has occurred only six times since 1990.
Irresponsible spending has been the norm for nearly six decades. Since 1965, Congress has submitted only five balanced budgets. Those were for fiscal years 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001. The last time the US experienced a budget surplus was in 2001.
Most of the reported concessions are in the best interest of all Americans.
Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, Parler, Post, and Mastodon.world at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.
His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).