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While eyes are on Trump and tariffs and all that, there is a minor crisis brewing in the House on proxy voting.
For background, the Constitution provides little substantive guidance for how to run the legislature other than
Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, which in practice has been taken to mean that they can make and remake their own rules by a majority vote at any time. One aspect of this is that they need rules to do anything -- without a resolution adopting rules of procedure, the House cannot take up any business. Another facet of the rules (as they are today) is that the Speaker sets the agenda and controls what comes to a vote (and the rules for bringing amendments and so forth). This lead famously to the "majority of the majority" calculation -- a bill must have an absolute majority to pass but it must also have a majority of the majority to be put forth by their leadership to even get a vote. A curious exception to this is the "discharge petition" -- effectively a way for a majority of Representatives to force the leadership to put a particular matter up for vote without delay. Once presented with sufficient votes, a discharge petition is privileged from being preempted by other business.So with all that parliamentary background aside, here's where we are: a (now former) member of the freedom caucus with an solid conservative voting record is leading the charge to allow new parents to designate another member of the House as their proxy to vote on their behalf for 12 weeks after the birth of their child. The GOP leadership refused to put it up for a vote so she got 218 votes to discharge it, which means (under the current rules) the House has vote on it within 2 weeks.
Instead of taking the L, GOP leadership tried to play hardball and brought up a procedural rule to forbid the use of discharge petitions entirely. I found the text here. This apparently rankled enough republicans (changing the rules on what can be voted for because you're about to lose a vote is still frowned upon) to vote against the procedural rule, which in turn means the House is stuck. At that point, Johnson had no option but to adjourn till next week to buy time.
So basically this issue has frozen the House, right at the point where we might need a functioning Congress.
Tallying it up, I see a decent number of conservatives whose opposition to proxy voting for new parents is such that they won't accept any rules resolution in which it might come up for a vote (because they wouldn't accept losing that vote). On the other side, with Luna is is Trump who weight in saying (direct quote, because he's always quotable) "I like the idea of being able to — if you’re having a baby, I think you should be able to call in and vote. I’m in favor of that".
Editorializing a bit, for me the Article I framing firmly puts the procedural rules outside the realm of constitutional or judicial reckoning and makes it a political matter. Hence, I find the legalistic arguments on it to be misplaced -- it's not a legal matter. On the policy, it seems reasonable enough for the House to make a point of being pro-natal and I think voters can throw out any representative if they don't like her votes (by proxy or otherwise) in the next election.
I also think embedding a substantive proposal into a rule is pretty silly -- maybe I'm procedure-brained (or WEIRD) but this is just pants
Wait what? The chambers of Congress can change procedure with a simple majority? And presumably, the procedural changes survive elections?
This seems ripe for abuse. Say party A currently has a majority in the House, but knows that it will lose its majority after the elections. They can simply make a procedural rule saying that the speaker has to be elected with a 2/3rd majority, and until he is elected, the House can do nothing else but try to elect a speaker. (Or they might simply change the rules so that the guy with the longest beard is the speaker, if they have the guy with the longest beard.) This would prevent the newly elected majority from passing any laws until SCOTUS intervenes. I think it is good practice to require a 2/3 majority for changing how a legislature operates.
As I understand it, under the current rules the House will have to vote on some proposal X. Now people who do not want to vote on matter X introduce a proposal Y which says "we will not vote on matter X".
What I don't understand is how this would change the substantial outcome. Either a majority would support X, in which case they will surely not vote for proposal Y. Or a majority is opposed to X, in which case they presumably might support Y -- but that does not matter for the outcome because X is lacking support anyhow.
The only way this matters is if the vote itself is the problem, not the outcome -- if their base would be enraged if they voted against X, for example. However, the optics of "we specifically changed the rules so that we did not have to vote on the Stop Puppy Torture Act" does not feel substantially different from "we voted against the SPTA" -- you might keep the support of your most stupid puppy-loving constituents, but in turn you lose support from anyone who likes clean, efficient legislature instead of messy spaghetti code.
A majority can, at any time, remake the rules. The rules continue to apply at the pleasure of the majority.
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