How House Republicans are making life difficult for Democrats, Pelosi
Chad Pergram
FTA:
House Republicans are driving Democrats crazy, and driving a major wedge through the majority party.
GOPers are using a garden-variety procedural tool to goad Democrats into taking challenging votes on the floor – and risking the defeat or alteration of legislation which is on the verge of passing.
The parliamentary gambit is called the “Motion to Recommit,” or MTR as it’s known in congressional shorthand. MTR’s must be “germane” and tied directly to the legislation at hand.
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Most MTR’s resulted in party-line votes until 2007. That’s when Democrats again won control of the House after 12 years in the wilderness. Democrats captured the House with victories by moderate Democrats in battleground districts in the 2006 midterm elections. Seeing an opportunity, Republicans began crafting artful MTR’s, written in a way to put the squeeze on vulnerable Democrats. Democrats took pains to protect their new members and leaders granted them leeway to vote against the brass and in line with their district on some MTR’s. In the end, this created havoc for Democrats on the floor – even though they were in the majority.
The best example came in March 2007. Lawmakers debated a measure to award the District of Columbia a seat in the House. Republicans concocted a motion to recommit that would have repealed Washington’s ban on handguns. The MTR was germane because the bill dealt with the District of Columbia, and it made many conservative, pro-Second Amendment Democrats jumpy. In that instance, those Democrats had to choose whether to vote with the Republicans and the firearms proposal or against the philosophies of their districts and side with leadership.
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The GOP prevailed a few weeks ago, tacking on provisions via an MTR condemning anti-Semitism to a measure designed to halt U.S. action in Yemen. This week, a GOP MTR added language requiring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) be told about undocumented persons purchasing weapons to a background check bill.
Twenty-six Democrats joined Republicans in the effort, inflaming many Democrats.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., insists that Democrats should oppose motions to recommit as a matter of policy. Other Democrats believe leaders should give vulnerable Democrats more latitude. There is some chatter that Democrats could try to change the MTR rule.
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House Republicans would blow a gasket if Democrats revoked the MTR, curbing what little power the minority has in the House. Yet ironically, many House Republicans want to curb the power of the minority in the Senate (where Republicans hold the majority) and eliminate the filibuster.
McCarthy wouldn’t directly respond to the juxtaposition of those positions when pressed by Fox.
This must be the strangest article I’ve ever posted. Not what usually appeals but, like watching ice cream melt down a hand, and then an arm, and onto a shoe, it was compelling and finally I decided I loved it.
Michael Cohen fired his shots, but there was no magic bullet to end our national nightmare
By Matt Welch
Holster the toy cannons, people. Cancel those refresher courses on the 25th Amendment.
For all the fireworks, grubby details and rageaholic outbursts at Michael Cohen’s Capitol Hill public testimony Wednesday, it took just 11 short words from the felonious fixer’s opening statement to ensure that our long national nightmare will not, in fact, soon end: “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress.”
So concludes last month’s momentarily tantalizing notion — originally reported by BuzzFeed, unprecedentedly disputed by the office of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III — that President Trump “personally instructed” his thuggish capo to perjure himself. Some in Mueller’s carol-singing fan club had convinced themselves that his legalistic rebuttal of the story still left plenty of room for Cohen to deliver a knockout blow if he was ever allowed to testify in public.
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The logic of extreme polarization militates against self-reflection. After all, there’s always a new social media ruckus, foiled North Korea peace pact or Trump tweetstorm to scream at each other about.
That’s too bad. Because the elites of both parties, and of the politically adjacent professions (including — yes — journalism), actively helped create the unhappy conditions that made fit-throwing look like an attractive option to millions of voters, and not just those who chose Trump.
A magic bullet is extremely unlikely to take out either Trump or Mueller. Even if it could, the maladies that made them antagonists would still be with us. We’ve got a whole lot of work to do.