The House passed its new rules package 220–213 on Monday night, despite concerns among several Republicans about concessions that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had made to a group of 20 GOP holdouts in his bid for the speakership.
Texas GOP Representative Tony Gonzales voted with the Democrats against the measure. While the Senate has 44 “standing rules” that carry over from one Congress to the next, the House must adopt a rules package each Congress to lay out how the lower chamber will operate.
Just days after McCarthy clinched the speakership — following four days and 15 rounds of voting — he was left to once again try to rally the support of his party to pass the rules package. Republicans can afford very few defections with their razor-thin majority.
The package includes just several of a slate of concessions that McCarthy made in an effort to win support for his speakership bid from the Republican holdouts. Many of those compromises were made orally, rather than having been explicitly written into the rules package.
Among the concessions made in the package is a requirement to provide 72 hours of notice before a vote on new legislation, to allow members to have more time to review bills before they reach the floor. The rules package also restores the motion to vacate, which allows just one member of the House to call a vote to remove McCarthy from his role as speaker.
Republican Representative Don Bacon told CNN that the motion to vacate is worrisome to him.
“I think if it gets abused, we have the ability to change it. So we’re gonna let people — let’s test the waters here for a while, but if it gets abused – I hear some people may – then we should change it. But we’ll prove our point that we should never have done it one in the first place,” he said.
Bacon said he lobbied to raise the threshold to 30 members to call for such a vote, but McCarthy ultimately agreed to one member in a capitulation to the GOP rebels.
The package also reinstates the Holman rule, allowing lawmakers to amend appropriations legislation to reduce lawmakers’ salaries, fire federal employees, and cut programs.
The rules package details the formation of a House oversight subcommittee for investigating the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the U.S. government’s involvement in gain-of-function research.
Gonzales had warned for days that he planned to vote against the rules package because of a reported agreement by McCarthy to vote on a ten-year budget that would cap spending at fiscal year 2022 levels, effectively reducing defense spending by about 10 percent. However, the proposal is not included in the rules package itself. The package instead offered a first chance for Republicans to express concern for the perceived lack of transparency in the negotiations.
“This has a proposed billions of dollars cut to defense, which I think is a horrible idea,” Gonzales said during an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “When you have aggressive Russia and Ukraine, you’ve got a growing threat of China in the Pacific — you know, I’m going to visit Taiwan here in a couple of weeks — how am I going to look at our allies in the eye and say, I need you to increase your defense budget, but yet America is going to decrease ours?”
Representative Nancy Mace (R., S.C.) wavered on her support ahead of the vote on the rules as well, telling CBS she did not want to see defense cuts and expressing concern about what “back-room deals” the GOP defectors might have won in their negotiations with McCarthy. However, Mace ultimately voted for the measure.
“I like the rules package,” Mace said. “It is the most open, fair, and fiscally conservative package we’ve had in 30 years. I support it, but what I don’t support is a small number of people trying to get a deal done or deals done for themselves in private, in secret, to get a vote or vote present.”
In his negotiations with the Republican defectors, McCarthy also committed to removing metal detectors from the House chambers and ending proxy voting. House Freedom Caucus members are reportedly set to receive three of the nine seats on the House Rules Committee as part of the compromises.
McCarthy also agreed to vote individually on twelve appropriation bills instead of on one massive omnibus spending bill and to hold a vote on legislation on term limits for members of Congress.