A few interesting things on the House floor today:
1. The House adopted a special rule today (H.Res.502; here is the committee report from the Rules Committee) to take up the Senate amendment to the payroll tax bill and to disagree with the amendment and propose a conference. Last week, I brought the full-court geekery explaining special rule layover waivers and the special rule process in general. H.Res.502 is a nice compliment to that discussion: section 5 of the rule specifically waives the chamber rule requiring a two-thirds vote to consider a special rule on the same legislative day it is reported from the Rules Committee from now until January 15th, which is two days before the second session of the 112th Congress is scheduled to start.
Since the House was originally scheduled to close the 1st session of the 112th this week and is unlikely to take up major legislation other than the payroll tax and related items, the waiver more or less gives the House flexibility to act quickly on such deals between now and the start of the second session. As noted last week, the chamber rules allow same day consideration in the last days of a session, but that provision is often ineffective since (as is the current situation) the the session adjournment date is rarely known in advance.
2. I thought Jordan Ragusa’s post today regarding the House move to reject the Senate amendments and propose a conference was quite good (although I mildly disagree that the conferees matter much in this situation; they are almost certainly just proxies for the chamber leaders). Steve Benen was a bit annoyed this morning about the procedural method that the House was using to take up the issue, but, as Jordan points out, it wasn’t an unusual procedural action. Is the politics frustrating? Sure. But are the tactics some sort of convoluted invention? Not at all.
3. Representative Edwards (D-MD) raised a question of privileges of the House and offered a resolution (H.Res.504) disapproving of comments Representative West (R-FL) made earlier this week about the Democratic Party. Such a motion is privileged for consideration but only requires immediate action by the chair on the matter if it is offered by the majority leader or minority leader. When offered by anyone else, the chair can postpone ruling on whether the resolution qualifies for consideration under the chamber rules for two days. The chair did postpone, but only until after the debate on H.Res.501. Upon taking up the question of privileges again, the chair ruled that it did qualify, and the resolution was read in full by the clerk. Debate on the resolution then proceeded under the one-hour rule. Representative Price (R-GA), however, immediately moved to table the resolution, and the motion to table was agreed to, which kills the resolution.
4. A lively colloquy was held between Minority Leader Hoyer (D-MD) and Majority Leader Cantor (R-VA). A colloquy is nothing more than a back and forth discussion between two or more Members, accomplished procedurally in the House by a Member gaining the floor for some period of time and then yielding to the other Member as necessary for discussion. The floor leaders regularly have a colloquy at the end of a workweek to discuss the upcoming schedule, but today was different because the colloquy occurred in the middle of a series of votes, which meant that most of the House membership was in attendance for it. This led to some cheering and mild booing as the leaders discussed the upcoming schedule.
