The Top Line
Enter, dear reader, where shadows now creep,
Where Congress in silence its secrets does keep.
This week’s eerie tales lie hidden in code,
Where AI and power share a winding road.
The House Committee stirs with a plan,
In whispers and meetings where schemes began
New rules are forged in the tech-driven night,
While fragile links vanish with power’s slight.
And what’s this rumble in Washington’s walls?
Rumors of shifts as October’s chill falls.
The GOP’s halls echo with dread,
Where the Speaker’s rules rise from the dead.
Some say “Czar Cannon” lingers around,
A ghostly guide to the battleground.
So grasp a goblet of pumpkin-spiced lore,
For data, debate, and mysteries galore.
In the heart of democracy’s hallowed maze,
You’ll find tales to chill and intrigue to amaze.
Artificial intelligence and data
The Committee on House Administration released its October 2024 Flash report on AI and accompanying press release. They highlighted the committee’s approval of a House AI policy; meetings with transcription service providers and CRM providers; and working with leg branch agencies on their AI implementation.
As you would expect, we have links to all of House Admin’s AI flash reports, Legislative branch agency AI use cases, and a number of other useful resources on AI in parliaments.
One thing that makes me a bit nervous is, should power flip in the House, direct links to the reports on the House Admin website will cease to function. Democrats and Republicans have their own committee websites and the main committee URL will be directed to the other party’s website. It would be great if there were a way for these documents to be posted on a website where the URLs won’t break, like docs.house.gov.
Factions, leadership, and the shuffle
Several members may be gearing up to challenge House GOP Policy Chair Gary Palmer for his leadership spot. POLITICO has more.
Sen. Tillis fires back against an open amendment process on the Senate floor or having members get concessions from the next Republican leader prior to a vote. Punchbowl has the letter. See the written exchanges here. Debates over where to locate power are almost always debates over who gets to exercise power and to what end.
Around this time in the Congressional cycle there are lots of reports about how important positions will be shuffled after the election. Roll Call takes a good look at Appropriations; Politico looks at committee posts throughout the House.
Executive Branch
The Open Government Federal Advisory Committee held its first substantive meeting this past Wednesday. The agenda and rough transcript are available online and I expect video will be available soon as well. From my vantage point the meeting was successful. It kicked off with statements of White House and GSA support for open government, included presentations on the recent history of open government efforts and the Open Government Partnership, and launched a series of monthly committee meetings.
If you want to comment on the U.S. government’s open government National Action Plan, the deadline to submit your ideas to the federal register is November 12th. I recently submitted two recommendations, on implementation of the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act and on public access to OLC opinions. It’d also comment to your attention the attached comment on the Blueprint for Accountability. Comments are open to everyone.
FedScoop reports the White House is getting close to releasing new guidance on federal data pursuant to the Open Government Data Act. This is welcome news. In 2019, I was interviewed about the bill, saying “The legislation’s effectiveness will depend greatly on OMB’s implementation.”
Rules Reform
Should the House rules be amended to empower a future speaker pro tempore? Former Speaker pro tempore Patrick McHenry says no, according to Politico. “We have a speakership that stands as a legislative counter force to the presidency because we have rules enabling the power of the speakership. When you diminish that and when you diminish the importance of the speakership, you diminish its powers.”
Is he right? Ehhhhh. There’s a good argument that the centralization of power in the Speaker’s office in the mid-90s actually weakened the power of the House of Representatives. There’s lots of ways to organize the House of Representatives to empower it as an institution. Does it mean he’s wrong about empowering a future speaker pro tempore? It seems it depends on what powers and under what circumstances.
There’s lots more under discussion about changing the House rules. House Republicans are at loggerheads about whether to raise the threshold to trigger a vote on the removal of a Speaker. Rank and file members should be up-in-arms about changing this threshold as it’s the best leverage they have to negotiate concessions from leadership, at least when the majority is slim. Members who already have more power have less need of this rule so long as they are only skirmishing with leadership, but if they have a big fight over, say, legislation bypassing committees, then they’ll want it, too.
POLITICO reports that conservatives also want to constrain the ability to pass legislation on suspension – for the obvious reason that this is how a subset of the Republican conference can leverage the unwillingness of their co-partisans to defect as a means to block policies an overwhelming majority of the chamber would approve.
It’s for similar reasons that some Republicans, including leadership, also want to raise the threshold for the discharge petition. This provision was originally created because three Republicans, through control of the Rules committee and member appointment mechanisms, ruled the chamber with a vice-like grip. Part of the price of allowing progressive Republicans to overthrow Czar Cannon in 1910 and reform the chamber rules was the creation of a discharge petition, initially set at 100 members. The threshold has bumped around; the modern version of the discharge petition was set at 145 in 1931 (i.e., ⅓ of the chamber) and raised to 218 in 1935. The changing threshold had to do with members of the Republican party of that era wanting to go around leadership to enact legislation supported by the majority of the chamber.
Discharge petitions are rarely successful but they do offer a mechanism for a majority to fix the chamber’s rules when things get stuck. Making the discharge petition harder to use and making it harder to suspend the rules is how you give a junior partner in a governing coalition veto power over a legislative agenda. It transforms the House into a Senate-like body, where just about anyone can gum up the works.
One lesson of history is that the people who think they will benefit from a rules change may find themselves in disfavorable circumstances later on. Another is that the rules are initially written to empower those who write them to further immediate political goals.
A thought experiment. I don’t know what the fix is to allow majorities to work their will and let parties run the House when it comes to speaker selection. But I can imagine something like ranked choice voting as helping to mitigate the political dilemma if you also transform the motion to vacate into a vote on who should be speaker. In other words, the speaker is only deposed if someone else has a majority of votes.
Imagine if a member making the motion is required to propose an alternative candidate. One result could be three candidates: Ronnie the Republican Leader (and incumbent Speaker); Igor the Insurgent (Republican); and Danny the Democratic Leader.
An insurgent likely wouldn’t make a motion unless they hold the balance of power, so let’s say there are 219 Republicans in the House and 217 Democrats. Since we’ve got ranked choice voting, members who vote have to order their preferences for top, second, and last.
Democrats would all rank Danny the Democrat as their #1 choice. They could abstain from choosing a second choice (if we give them that option); if they must pick a #2, they’d likely agree on Ronnie the Republican as their #2 pick.
Let’s say 213 of the 219 Republicans rank Ronnie as their #1 choice. Maybe they pick Danny as their second choice – but let’s say they all pick Igor the Insurgent as their second choice.
What about the remaining six Republicans? They’ll pick Igor the Insurent as their first choice. If they pick Ronnie the Republican as their second choice, then the result – after the candidate with the lowest amount of votes is eliminated and their second preferences is counted – is that Ronnie the Republican would have a majority. So… no change.
What if they refuse to pick a second choice? If so, that’d be unwise, because if Igor the Insurgent loses, Danny the Democrat would have 217 votes and Ronnie the Republican would only have 213. Whoops, they just turned over control of the chamber. If you’re a hardline Republican, that’s going to be tough to explain back home. (So they pick Ronnie – and Ronnie now wins.)
Presumably the hardliners could make a motion to vacate Danny the Democrat, but that takes time and they’d have handed the House to Democratic control.
You could imagine a circumstance where there are additional candidates, but the end result is the same. Eventually, a majority will vote to not allow such a motion to proceed.
Okay, all this is making me tired. Send me a note about why I’m wrong. 🙂 Let’s move on.
Parliaments worldwide
The iLegis conference on legislation and law reform this past week featured a number of interesting talks – the agenda is here – including one by Mark Hadley, CBO’s COO and General Counsel, on the intersection of legislative drafting and federal budgeting. You can see his slides here. (I was present for some of the conference.) I’ve inquired whether video of the talks will be made publicly available. The event was well worth attending.
San José, Costa Rica is the location of an upcoming hemispheric interparliamentary meeting focused on migration in the context of socio-environmental challenges.
Support offices and agencies
GAO Restricted Reports. It’s hard to tell, but it appears GAO has given public notice of the existence of two new restricted reports for FY 2025, one entitled “Tactical Aircraft: Operation and Maintenance Spending Varies by System, and Availability Generally Does Not Meet Service Goals,” and the other “U.S. Nuclear Capabilities: DOD Should Expeditiously Establish a Decision Timeframe for Responding to Increasing Threats.” If you want a copy, contact GAO.
GAO made two new appointments to the Physician-Focused Payment Model Technical Advisory Committee, Henish Bhansali and Krishna Ramachandra, and reappointed two current members. The committee, created by federal law in 2015, is focused on improving how Medicare pays physicians for the care they provide to Medicare beneficiaries.
The Office of Congressional Workplace Rights will hold five training sessions this quarter. They cover civility and resilience (on October 21 and October 28), and the Congressional Accountability Act (October 30, November 18, and December 11).
The AOC IG substantiated a misconduct complaint against AOC employee Joseph Brame. Brame is no longer with the AOC and is now working at another federal agency.
Odds and ends
The Office of Congressional Ethics issued a report for its activities in the third quarter of 2024. Between July and September, the OCE transmitted four matters to the House Ethics Committee, including two recommendations for further review; it published its report on a matter involving Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick; and it updated its website to ease public access to its governing rules and processes. Thus far, in the 118th Congress OCE transmitted 9 items for House Ethics Committee review. In the third quarter, OCE received 5,659 communications from private citizens.
The Levin Center released a look-back at the Fulbright hearings, televised oversight hearings focused on the Vietnam War, which “forced greater scrutiny of U.S. military actions, exposed misrepresentations by the executive branch, and helped shift public opinion against the war. The hearings illustrate the powerful role that congressional inquiries can play in informing the public about their government and shaping public opinion.”
Open the floodgates. Is anyone surprised that the Supreme Court’s Chevron decision in Loper-Bright has triggered a tsunami of lawsuits to overturn federal regulations?
Congratulations, Rep. Kilmer, on the new gig.
