The 34-page document that has House Democrats sounding the alarm
By Michael Jones
The vote to narrowly reelect Mike Johnson (R-La.) as House Speaker last Friday unsurprisingly attracted the most public attention last Friday, the first day of the new Congress.
The next vote was just as consequential but received far less media attention. House Republicans, against unanimous Democratic opposition, passed a resolution, colloquially known as a “rules package,” that determines how business is conducted in the chamber and ensures order during debates and votes.
Among the proposals in the 34-page document is a reform to the motion to vacate the chair, which would increase the threshold for the House to remove the speaker from one to nine members. This is the mechanism that former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) used to remove former Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023.) But for the first time in US history, the rules require the majority party to support an attempt to remove the speaker before it is considered privileged, a threshold that orders the resolution must be put to a floor vote within two legislative days after a member introduces it. In other words, Democrats are prohibited from moving to boot the speaker unless Republicans agree to it.
“This makes it clear that they have no intention of working together to find common ground,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee said ahead of the vote on the package. “Instead of electing a Speaker of the House, they decided to elect a Speaker of the Republican Conference–held hostage by their most extreme members.”
The rules package also renamed the Oversight and Accountability Committee to Oversight and Government Reform, eliminate the Diversity and Inclusion office, and allow members to electronically vote in committees. And thanks to a last-minute demand from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), it also eliminated gender-neutral language (parent, child, sibling, etc.) for so-called “family-centric language,” such as “father, mother, son, daughter, sister, brother, etc.).
It also bans Speaker Johnson from placing bills on what’s known as the “suspension calendar,” which allows the House to quickly pass legislation with a two-thirds majority after Wednesday. FWIW, these late-week suspension votes, which are now forbidden, have kept the government open on several occasions, provided security assistance to Ukraine, and authorized the country’s annual defense policy and programs. This limitation will dramatically reshape how the House governs this year.
However, the resolution also enabled the GOP to fast-track a dozen bills that provide the clearest window into the legislative agenda they plan to enact with Republican control of the House, Senate, and White House. These include the Laken Riley Act, which would require the federal government to detain undocumented immigrants who have been accused of theft-related crimes in the US. (The act also allows state attorneys general to sue the federal government for perceived violations of the Immigration and Nationality Act.)
The bill, named after a 22-year-old nursing student who was murdered last February while she was jogging at the University of Georgia by a 26-year-old Venezuelan man who had unlawfully entered the country and previously been arrested on theft and shoplifting charges, passed the House this week and is cleared a major procedural hurdle in the Senate, increasing the odds that Donald Trump could sign it into to law as one of his first official acts of his second term.
“I just think it goes to show that their agenda is not what they said it was going to be, which is to lower costs and to do work for the American people,” Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.) told me before voting against the rules package. “This is just more of the anti-immigration agenda that the incoming administration is going to be focused on.”
Democrats attacked House Republicans for the substance of the bills and the process they’re attempting to pass them. Committees haven’t been formalized, including the panel that sets the terms and conditions for floor debate and amendments. This prevents members from seriously discussing the provisions in the legislation and offering policies to improve it. Slipping the bills into the rules package is seen as an affront to the regular order House Republicans, including ultraconservatives, claim they want the House to govern with.
“The American people did not vote for whatever the hell this is,” McGovern said. “And you better believe that Democrats will not let Republicans turn the House of Representatives into a rubber stamp for their extreme policies.”
The rules package also includes a bill that would amend Title IX to prevent student-athletes from using pronouns, bathrooms, and locker rooms that align with their gender identity. For context, the Biden administration expanded Title IX to include gender identity in 2024.
“When Democrats [won in 2020], our first 10 bills [were] our priorities. The Equality Act is a part of it. The PRO Act for workers was a part of it. Voting rights was a part of it here,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.), co-chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, told me. “[Republicans] have got all kinds…of issues for their base, but not necessarily to help American people, and certainly not related to what they said they were going to do when they got elected. So I think it’s a statement of values. It’s just that they’re bad values, and certainly not what they promised people.”
Speaking of voting rights, Democrats say Republicans would further erode them with the SAVE Act, a bill in the rules package that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Many have argued that this is an unnecessary step, as citizenship is already required in federal elections, and signing a voter registration form as a noncitizen is already illegal.
“As a person who fights every day for the John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the For the People Act, I’m offended by some of the stuff that’s in the SAVE Act,” Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), who serves as the top Democrat on the House Administration subcommittee on elections. “I think that at the end of the day, the Republicans have such a such a slim majority and they’ll have to come to us for must-pass legislation and hopefully there’ll be some wiggle room to get pieces of legislation that that really reflect the priorities of the Democrats in as well.”
With little electoral power for at least the next two years, Democrats will have to rely on a rhetorical strategy to point out the disconnect between the culture-war measures Republicans have prioritized and the kitchen-table concerns Americans expressed in the November election.
But they say they’re up to the tall task.
“We’re going to keep outlining some of the areas where Republicans are pushing policies that aren’t in line with what they campaigned on. And these bills are going to do nothing to help bring down grocery prices, housing, and the things that we know Americans care about,” Barragán told me. “So I think we’ll continue to raise the point and show what Republicans are actually doing, as opposed to what they campaigned on doing.”
Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.
