The House passed its rules package for the 119th Congress on Friday, approving a change that makes it more difficult to oust the speaker and reserving that right for the majority party alone.
The rules package, which passed in a 215-209 vote, requires nine members of the majority party to co-sponsor a motion to vacate the speaker from the top leadership position, up from current rules that only require one. The change offers some breathing room for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) as he enters his first full term as speaker, especially after he faced initial opposition to secure the gavel earlier in the day.
The new motion-to-vacate threshold was met with some resistance from House Democrats, who accused Republicans of “partisan extremism” by making it impossible for the minority party to have a say in the matter.
“Their proposed changes would, for the first time in American history, shield the Speaker from accountability to the entire chamber by making it so that only Republicans can move to oust the speaker,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, said in a statement. “This makes it clear that they have no intention of working together to find common ground. Instead of electing a Speaker of the House, they have decided to elect a Speaker of the Republican Conference — held hostage by their most extreme members.”
Other Democrats denounced the proposal, citing an instance last year in which Johnson relied on the minority party to dismiss a motion to oust him from the speakership. Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) also argued it could come back to haunt Republicans in the future if they lose the majority.
“This is a major mistake. We didn’t make the motion to vacate, his own members did,” Moskowitz said in a statement. “This will start the eroding of the minority party. Should this succeed, in just a couple of years, his members won’t be on committees or be able to file bills in the minority. You break it, you own it.”
The move to increase the motion to vacate threshold comes after a handshake agreement between hard-line Republicans and centrist Republicans in the House GOP Conference last year. Members of the centrist Main Street Caucus agreed to withdraw proposed rules to punish lawmakers who choose to buck leadership on the floor in exchange for increasing the required number of co-sponsors from one to nine.
Additionally, Republicans updated the package to prohibit voting on motions under suspension of rules unless the legislation is brought to the floor during the first half of the week, on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. That way, GOP leaders can’t bypass the Rules Committee to bring legislation to the floor, which became standard practice last year for the House to pass government spending legislation.
The rules package also includes language authorizing the House Judiciary Committee to issue a number of subpoenas to continue investigations into the Biden family that were thwarted while President Joe Biden was in office. Among those is a subpoena for Attorney General Merrick Garland related to special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents while he was vice president.
The Judiciary Committee sought to hold Garland in contempt of Congress last year for withholding interview tapes between Hur and Biden’s memoir ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer, but that effort was thwarted after Biden asserted executive privilege over the materials. Garland requested that Biden assert his privilege, arguing the committee’s request was “plainly insufficient to outweigh the deleterious effects that production of the recordings would have on the integrity and effectiveness of similar law enforcement investigations in the future.”
The rules package would also allow the Judiciary Committee to subpoena Justice Department attorneys Mark Daly and Jack Morgan related to the department’s investigation into Hunter Biden.
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The committee worked for months to obtain testimony from the pair, but the Justice Department repeatedly blocked those efforts, citing policies that the department does not permit line-level employees to testify, particularly about open matters such as the Biden case.
The package included several other changes, such as changing the name of the Office of Congressional Ethics to the Office of Congressional Conduct as well as extending the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party into the next Congress.
