The Guardian Unlimited
Wednesday 24 October 2007
Republicans use obscure motion 16 times in a year, compared to just 14 for the Democrats in more than a decade of opposition.
All year long, Democrats in the House of Representatives have watched with increasing impatience as their Senate counterparts find themselves bedevilled by a filibuster-wielding Republican minority. On measures criticising the war in Iraq, the House has passed four since May to the Senate's zero; on annual spending bills, the House has cleared all 12 to the Senate's six.
That Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and his Senate Republican colleagues routinely have blocked the Democrats from getting the needed 60 votes on many measures has received considerable press attention, even inspiring a splashy "anti-obstruction" media campaign.
What's far less well known, though, is that the party has almost as nasty a bugaboo in the House. Republicans there have found stunning success with a procedural tool called the motion to recommit, and they have repeatedly used it to divide the Democratic caucus and block key initiatives.
Sometimes called the MTR, its full name is the motion to recommit, with or without instructions. Ironically offered as a minority-party right by Newt Gingrich in the heyday of the Contract With America, its aim is to allow the often-powerless House minority a chance to shape legislation as it moves toward a vote. Even if Democrats allow no debate on amendments to a bill, the MTR guarantees Republicans a vote - usually minutes before final passage - either on new additions they have written or on forcing the measure back to square one.
Republicans have mastered the game of crafting MTRs they know will force Democrats to defect to their side or risk political consequences, especially among the 60 or so Democrats who represent "red" districts. Some Republicans motions are phrased to ensure a delay of the bill at hand if they pass, compelling Democrats to pull measures from the floor rather than lose precious ground.
When Democrats were in the House minority, they succeeded only rarely in blocking Republican initiatives with the gambit. The MTR helped push through the television filter known as the "v-chip" in 1995 and nearly closed campaign-finance loopholes aimed at free-spending political groups four years before the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth targeted John Kerry. Only 14 of the motions, or 7.6 percent of the minority's efforts, prevailed between 1995 and 2006.
This year, 16 of the House Republican motions have passed, several with significant support from across the aisle, blocking initiatives large and small. Remember the effort to bring voting rights in the House to the District of Columbia, which stalled before falling short over the summer? It was derailed first by a successful MTR that called for overturning the US capital's gun ban, which many red-state Democrats supported. Another gave legal immunity to anyone reporting suspected terrorist activity on public transportation, which some Democrats decried as a call to racial profiling.
But the biggest MTR intrusion of the year came last week, when the Republicans stalled a bill to provide greater judicial oversight of secret wiretapping by the Bush administration with a proposed MTR that even critics begrudgingly called clever. The motion provided that no court order would be needed to tap the phones of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida members - a caveat that frustrated Democrats noted was already in their measure.
"All members and all Americans believe in this goal," one Democratic memo stated, "so the authors cynically wrote this redundant motion in such a way that if it passed it would KILL this important national security bill."
The MTR now threatens to become as aggravating to the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, as the filibuster has for Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader. House Democrats have vowed to bring back the wiretapping bill soon, but there are few solutions in sight for how to defeat the Republican MTR should it rear its head.
"We need some discipline on motions to recommit," said Massachusetts Democratic congressman Jim McGovern, a veteran of the rules committee that sets procedures for House debate. "That's going to come."
Indeed, Republicans stopped the majority of Democratic MTRs under Mr Gingrich and former speaker Dennis Hastert by treating the votes as purely political. Even if the minority's alternative plan had merit, Republican leaders urged solidarity, and the motion's defeat, as a matter of party loyalty.
Despite a 93% record of sticking together on House votes this year compared to 84% for Republicans, Democrats have found party loyalty elusive on several MTRs. The clash between a Democratic bill and its forced amendment can be stark: to legislation cracking down on the "no-bid" contracts that have driven charges of Bush administration cronyism, Republicans added language requiring colleges to welcome military recruiters onto campus.
Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein, who recently wrote a book on the health of the legislature titled The Broken Branch, predicted that Democrats might have to consider changing the rules for the pesky motions.
"Democrats are not anticipating as well as perhaps they might some things that can come to the floor and heading them off with language that might be in the bill ... to cut the pins out from under the motions to recommit," Mr Ornstein said.
Such an attempt risks unsavoury coverage that contrasts a mid-year rules change with vows from Ms Pelosi and others to run an open and transparent House. When some Democrats suggested in March altering the guidelines for relevance ("germaneness," in Congress-speak) of the MTRs, Republicans threatened to walk out of the chamber and halt business altogether.
John Boehner, an Ohio Republican and the House minority leader, crowed at those reports of a planned rules change.
"Perhaps before they game the system by changing the rules to their liking, the Democrat leadership should ask its own members why they are voting in droves for our proposals," Mr Boehner said, dropping the "-ic" suffix from his rivals' party in a common Washington putdown.
Faced with the choice between limiting Republican attempts to split their caucus and prodding those members to resist the MTRs, Democrats are likely to choose the latter, at least for the time being. The Republicans' 30-second campaign ad on the wiretapping motion may write itself - featuring ominous Bin Laden visuals and a voiceover murmuring, "Democratic congressman X voted to stop the government from listening to terrorists' phone calls" - but the party's nearly 10-to-1 fundraising advantage over Republicans helps take the sting out of that threat.
Besides, as Mr McGovern pointed out, "If I order the wrong thing for lunch, these guys will run a 30-second ad against me."
The stakes are particularly high for the House wire-tapping vote. Democrats believe they have the votes to pass their bill, which largely threads the needle in satisfying the liberals and conservatives among them. But a difficult battle remains with their filibuster-plagued Senate counterparts.
The Senate intelligence committee has offered legal immunity to the telecommunications companies that allowed the Bush administration to eavesdrop without a court order. That group of senators is the only congressional panel to win access to documents on the purported legal framework for the wiretapping, and Democrats in the House have refused to discuss immunity until their members can examine the documents.
"We can't provide immunity when we don't know what we're providing immunity for," said Stacey Farnen Bernards, a spokeswoman for House majority leader and Maryland Democrat Steny Hoyer.
The Senate judiciary committee soon will take up the intelligence committee's measure, and its members remain in the dark with the House, denied access to the Bush administration documents. Even if the Senate begins debating a bill without a shield for the telecoms, however, Republicans there are almost certain to insist on 60 votes to end a filibuster.
Thus Democrats' ability to beat back an MTR and pass the House bill becomes crucial to establishing the party's position, as George Bush continues to insist on his way or a veto.
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