Also from Tim Fernholz -- the kid is good! -- comes some analysis of a quietly important change in the House Rules.The most interesting adjustment is a modification of the motion to recommit, one of the few ways that the minority party in the House can kill a piece of legislation. A motion to recommit sends the bill back to its originating committee with instructions to amend it; this in effect ends consideration of the legislation. The change that has been made, like all fun legal changes, revolves around a single word: In the past, the minority party could recommit the bill "promptly," which returned it to committee. Now they will be unable to do that, instead recommitting the bill "forthwith," which forces an immediate floor vote (after a short debate) on whatever amendment the minority would like to have attached to the bill, preventing the parliamentary maneuver from holding up the final legislation for long.Now that's a lot of Robert's Rules mumbo-jumbo, what's the real world effect? The procedure has been used to kill bills on issues like D.C. voting rights, public housing improvements, and various appropriations and authorization bills that included provisions opposed by Republicans...The motion to recommit has been around for a while, but like the filibuster, it has seen increasing use in the last decade or so -- Newt Gingrich deployed it with great effect while in the minority during the early nineties. If the rules change eases legislative obstruction and is politically uncontroversial, one wonders if the burgeoning support for removing the filibuster from the Senate, or amending filibuster rules to make it harder to enact, will grow large enough to see action from Democratic Leadership. The change is also a sign of the confidence of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her team, reflecting her desire to put a real stamp on the institution and her own legacy.
Ending the filibuster wouldn't be a quiet change to the rules. It would be a brutal war. That bit of obstruction has a political and cultural salience that no other minority maneuver can touch. But there are precedents for this sort of thing. John F. Kennedy is remembered as a weak president who laid the rhetorical groundwork for the Great Society but managed to enact none of it. But it was a small change Kenendy championed in Congress's procedural architecture that arguably made all of Johnson's achievements possible. Each bill that goes to the House floor requires a "rule" that sets the time allotted for debate and the types of amendments that can be considered. The rule is decided by the Rules Committee. Without it, the bill can't advance.In the 1960s, the chairman of the Rules Committee was a canny arch-segregationist named Howard Smith who well understood his power to stall a bill by simply declining to set a hearing date for its rules. That didn't kill the legislation so much as it kept it from ever enjoying life. But it worked. When Kennedy was elected, he called Sam Rayburn, then Speaker of the House, to Florida for a quick conference. He wanted to expand the Committee from 12 members to 15, adding three liberals who would ensure a majority voted in favor of progress. Before he died, Rayburn called the campaign to expand the Rules Committee "the worst fight of my life." But he won it. If he hadn't, everything from the Civil Rights Act to Medicare might have been extinguished by Smith's parliamentary maneuvering.All of which is to make two points: First, the rules matter. And second, they can be changed. The fight to change them can be ugly and hard, but sometimes, as it was in the 1960s, it can be worth it. If over the next few years, Democrats find themselves relatively unencumbered by the filibuster (they will have 59 votes), then engaging that battle might be unwise. But if they find that the filibuster blocks everything from global warming to health reform, then they'll have to ask themselves how many lives should be sacrificed on the altar of Senate tradition. (For more on all this, see my review of The Liberal Hour.)
