The House Rules Committee held a Member Day hearing Thursday, allowing the rank-and-file to propose changes to how the chamber conducts its business — and in one case, to make a personal announcement.
“I have a current vested interest,” Rep. Brittany Pettersen, D-Colo., said as she advocated for allowing members to vote by proxy while taking parental leave. “I’m 20 weeks pregnant.”
“Since the establishment of Congress in 1789, there have been more than 12,500 members to serve in this body. Just 12 of those members are women who have given birth during their term,” said Pettersen, who became the first Colorado state senator to give birth while in office in 2020. “The current prohibition on proxy voting forces pregnant members and members who have recently welcomed a child to choose between taking care of their newborn or representing their constituents.”
In all, 10 members offered their ideas for improving the House’s standard operating procedures at the start of the 119th Congress next year, with several others submitting written testimony. The proposals fell into three broad categories: ideas to help Congress pass more bipartisan bills, to help members do their jobs, and to further partisan policy goals, with most falling into the first two buckets.
A handful of the suggestions emerged from the work of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, which operated in the previous two Congresses. Many of ModCom’s recommendations have already been implemented, and its former chairman, retiring Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Wash., urged the Rules Committee to consider more, highlighting five proposals in particular: instituting a biennial bipartisan retreat at the start of each new Congress; requiring each committee to hold a bipartisan, agenda-setting meeting at the start of each session; creating a new Joint Committee on Legislative Processes that would expedite consideration of legislation that has passed one chamber with broad bipartisan support; creation of a select committee “charged with making recommendations on how to reduce political violence, toxic polarization, and the spread of misinformation”; and allowing two members from opposing parties to jointly sponsor bills.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II, D-Mo., had introduced a resolution last year that would allow two members, one from the majority and another from the minority party, to jointly introduce a bill, calling the proposal Building Unity through Dual Sponsors, or BUDS.
Currently, while a bill can have any number of “original co-sponsors,” there is only one actual sponsor whose name is shown as the lead.
Rules ranking member Jim McGovern, D-Mass., expressed support for the general idea but suggested that any two members — not necessarily from different parties — should be able to jointly sponsor a bill to reflect when two offices work equally on legislation.
A coalition of good governance organizations from across the political spectrum, including Bipartisan Policy Center Action and POPVOX Foundation, recently sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries supporting that proposal, plus others to overhaul the committee scheduling system, create a joint committee on the continuity of Congress, and heed Kilmer’s call for bipartisan committee retreats.
Another idea that attracted a lot of bipartisan interest came from Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas. While House offices can currently designate two staffers for “Top Secret” clearance, that does not include “Sensitive Compartmented Information” clearance, meaning that members on some sensitive committees get information they can’t share with their personal staff. “Members of Congress have a solemn duty to provide for the common defense and to conduct effective oversight of the executive branch,” Castro said. “But to do so, we need appropriately cleared staff to support our efforts.”
The Senate made a similar change in 2021, which allowed one aide per personal office to get TS/SCI clearance. Castro, who sits on the Intelligence Committee, also submitted a letter signed by 53 members from both parties urging the change.
Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., drew inspiration from his home state’s legislative rules in proposing a slew of changes, including a rule to allocate party seats on committees (besides Rules) proportionally to the party’s control of the House.
McGovern seemed intrigued by some of Griffith’s ideas, but needled him on excepting the Rules Committee. “It could have been a 7 to 6 [split] and we could have had some fun this year,” McGovern said.
Thanks to the lengthy speakership battle at the start of the 118th Congress last year, the House technically had no members for its first few days. Usually, the members-elect pick a speaker, who then swears them all in, but without a speaker to administer the oath, they were all stuck in limbo, including members who had won reelection. That meant almost no official work could be done.
Rep. Virginia Foxx offered a potential fix. “To prevent confusion in the event that future Congresses also have difficulty electing a speaker, I believe it is wise to ensure that members-elect become full-fledged members of Congress on Jan. 3 at noon,” the North Carolina Republican said. “The best way to do that is to require members-elect to submit signed oath of office cards to the House Clerk before noon on Jan. 3.”
Daniel Schuman, executive director at the left-leaning American Governance Institute, thought the general idea has merit. “It seems to make a fair amount of sense,” he said.
Rep. Bill Foster, D-Ill., urged the committee to overhaul how discharge petitions work, in the hopes of getting more bills that have broad bipartisan support on to the floor. Under current rules, if a majority of members sign a discharge motion, they can force floor consideration of a bill over the objections of the speaker.
Often, House leadership blocks votes on legislation that would presumably pass in a bipartisan landslide for some political reason, if it either would benefit the minority party at the polls or is fiercely opposed by some faction of the majority. If members could choose to sign discharge petitions anonymously, Foster said, it would make the rarely invoked procedure a more potent way to give popular ideas their due. His proposal would make the signatories public only after the majority threshold was reached.
Speaking “on behalf of Chairman Jodey Arrington” of the Budget Committee, Rep. Rudy Yakym, R-Ind., recommended a series of changes related to the budget process to “ensure greater fiscal accountability and responsibility,” but even his fellow Republicans sounded skeptical of some of them.
Yakym recommended implementing a new rule to cap outlays in appropriations measures that exceed the 302(b) allocations; a rule requiring members seeking “emergency” spending to submit in writing how exactly their proposed outlays qualify as emergencies; and a rule addressing the use of CHIMPs, or “change in mandatory programs,” to offset new discretionary spending.
“Doesn’t the Budget Committee already have jurisdiction over defining ‘emergency’ designations?” Rules Chairman Michael Burgess, R-Texas, asked.
“We do, but we also believe that having this fully baked into the rules would be an additional layer of accountability and enforceability,” Yakym replied.
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