WAKE UP!!!
The House of Representatives runs on a rather byzantine set of rules, and one in particular has frustrated Nancy Pelosi, to the joy of House Republicans. The "motion to recommit." Here's the basic deal. Whenever a piece of legislation goes to the floor of the House for debate and a vote, it first goes to the Rules Committee. The Rules Committee determines what kinds of amendments, if any, will be allowed consideration on the floor. The Rules Committee will always be stacked with majority party loyalists. Seth Moulton-types need not apply. The majority party controls legislative procedure largely through the Rules Committee. The minority party would generally like to offer amendments, but the Rules Committee just won't let them. The majority party uses its control of the Rules Committee, and procedure more generally, to exercise what we call "negative agenda control." They just block stuff that they don't want to come up for a vote, which pretty much includes everything the minority party wants to do.
There is, however, a bit of a loophole, if you can make it work. It's called the "motion to recommit." There are a few variations of the motion, but the one that has gotten interesting is the version where the minority party uses it as a workaround when the Rules Committee tells them that they can't offer the amendments they want to offer. So, here's the quick-and-dirty. House Republicans can't offer amendments the normal way because James McGovern, current Chair, and the rest of the Dems on the Committee tell them to go suck on some exhaust pipes if they think emissions are so harmless. When a bill gets to the floor, the Republicans offer a procedural motion called a "motion to recommit," which would, if passed, allow them to offer their amendments.
OK, this is a weird thing. Procedural motions happen all the time, and when we break up votes on substance from votes on procedure, historically, Members of Congress are way more loyal to their party on procedural motions than on substance. The reasoning has been twofold. From the party leader's perspective, as long as they maintain procedural control, they can get whatever outcomes they want, no matter what the substantive votes are. With negative agenda control, as long as they successfully block the propositions they don't like through procedural control, they don't care how people vote on the substantive stuff, right? That's the cool thing about negative agenda control. By definition, you always win. The House always wins! From the perspective of individual Members of Congress, you aren't actually voting for or against bills-- you are just casting procedural votes, so who cares, right? And that has, historically, been the logic of the arrangement.
What has resulted is a threat. Vote against the party on a bill because you need to win the next election, and we're cool with that. We'd rather keep the seat in party hands. Vote against us on procedure? No. You don't get to do that. You know that committee seat you have? Nice seat you have there. Pity if anything happened to it...
Voting against the party on procedure has, historically, not been tolerated. Do that, and you aren't going to get the committee seats you want, etc. A good way to bring on the punishment? Voting for minority party motions to recommit, allowing them to bring amendments to the House floor, after having been denied amendments by the Rules Committee.
And yet, this is exactly what is happening right now in the House. A bunch of... shall we say, politically unsophisticated House freshmen are being suckered in by the Republicans to vote for motions to recommit, allowing the GOP to bring amendments to the House floor, against the majority-of-the-majority's wishes, and Pelosi, so far, hasn't punished them. She gave them some tough talk this week, but so far, hasn't done squat.
What's the deal? Has Pelosi lost it? I regularly praise her as one of the all-time greats, but if she can't keep order, is she screwing up? Has Kevin McCarthy just turned into such a brilliant strategist that he can outmaneuver Nancy Pelosi? (Spoiler alert: No. He's still just a weasel.)
The answer is implied by the other Speaker from modern history whom I praise as one of the all-time greats: John Boehner. Could John Boehner keep his caucus in line? No. Why not? They were nuts. What he could do was keep them from destroying the country in their stupid games of brinksmanship. Yes, that was a major accomplishment! The GOP was fractious under John Boehner, not because of his failures as a Speaker, but because of their underlying disunity.
So it goes. (Nobody catches the subtle references...)
Remember all those twits who kept telling you that Pelosi didn't have the votes to even be Speaker again? Remember what I told you? I told you she'd get that gavel. And she did. It's that the gavel just doesn't have the power anymore.
Buzzword time. Or... buzz...phrase. "Conditional party government." A party caucus will not allow its leadership to exercise power unless it is ideologically unified. Without that unity, delegating power to leadership would be stupid. The fact that it took so much for Pelosi to get the gavel tells you something about the state of disunity in the Democratic caucus right now. It tells you that the leadership cannot exercise much power. She had to cut a bunch of tenuous deals to get herself back into the Speaker's office, and the difficulty of that task makes the job too unstable to exercise the kinds of power that a Speaker would in an era with a more unified party.
With a truly unified party, a bunch of freshmen twits voting for minority party motions to recommit would be told, "one more of those, and you're off your committees. Two more, and you get primaried for voting with the GOP. We'll run ads morphing your face into Donald Trump." But, it isn't Pelosi. Anyone who thinks Seth the Moron Moulton would handle this more effectively a) doesn't understand how clueless Seth Moulton is, and b) doesn't get how the House works. If Pelosi started making bigger threats, she's be out, and the Dems would install someone so stupid and useless that even Kevin McCarthy could manipulate him. E.g., Seth Moulton.
What's going on among the House Democrats? Pelosi has to deal with basically three groups. She has a group of mainline Democrats who will basically just follow her lead. They know that that's the path to victory, either because they remember 2009-10, or are just sort of mainstream liberals who will go along with the current, or something like that. This is actually probably the majority of the caucus. Pelosi's problem, and the House Democrats' problem, is that there are two other groups. There's the Seth Moulton faction, who just don't understand how anything works and effectively want to hand control of everything back over to the GOP. Most of them don't fully understand that that's what they are doing at any given point in time. The Problem
In other words, being Speaker right now is a hard job. And Pelosi can't even pacify the rabble in her caucus with legislative victories because a GOP Senate and a cartoon villain President block that avenue, even as she has to keep the commie caucus from thinking that impeachment is on the table because that latter group wants to go down a self-destructive path.
Nancy Pelosi's job right now is very difficult, and the GOP is exploiting divisions during difficult times to force some embarrassing votes through motions to recommit. In other circumstances, they wouldn't be able to pull that off.
Right now, though, when assessing Pelosi's job performance, that's not the standard. Conditional party government. The Democrats are in disarray. That's why it was so difficult for her to regain the gavel, and that same factor would prevent anyone from maintaining order.
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