Right now, the House of Representatives is considering legislation via a process it has not used in quite some time: an open rule on the floor.

Under typical contemporary practice, legislation is brought to the floor under a special rule, basically a resolution that sets the terms of debate for the legislation. The House passes the resolution first, and then considers the actual legislation under the just-passed rules from the resolution.

A typical special rule nowadays is a “closed” rule or a “modified closed” rule, meaning that the amendments allowed to be offered on the floor during consideration of the bill are either none (under a closed rule) or just those specifically listed in the rule (under a modified closed). This is obviously the preference of the leadership (and, to a lesser extent,  the committees) since they control the rules committee and have the power to decide what comes to the floor. The last thing they want is random members monkeying with legislation by offering popular amendments that the leadership and/or committee that reported the bill doesn’t like.

But, of course, many backbenchers dislike closed rules. It shuts off the average member of congress from having much control at all over legislation that comes out of committees they are not on. And it centralizes power in the leadership. Yes, the backbenchers can always vote down the rule, but that’s not practical given the leverage the leadership has over the caucus, and the rewards/punishments the majority party can hand out to members who do/don’t toe the line on procedural votes like rules.

Reformers also tend to dislike closed rules. Once upon a time, a significant portion of legislation came up under an open rule. In recent years, the only bills that came up under open rules were certain appropriations bills. But even that stopped in the 111th Congress, in which there were no open rules. Many reformers see it as a basic affront to democracy, since once of the principle rules of deliberative democracy is that if you are considering legislation X and a majority thinks it would be improved by amendment Y, amendment Y should get into the bill. But that is often not the case under a closed rule.

So the consideration of H.R. 1 —  the full-year continuing resolution that will fund the government until October 1 —  this week is something of a novelty. It didn’t actually come up under a truly open rule; any amendment that a member wanted to offer had to be pre-printed in the congressional record by Tuesday. Still, that’s not much of a restriction — over 700 amendments were filed.  And the amendments can’t raise the total cost of the bill. Since each amendment is brought up under the 5-minute rule, it theoretically possible that every member could speak for 5 minutes on every amendment. It could be a real slog.

Of course, all 700 amendments will not be considered. Some are duplicative. Some will not survive points of order (this isn’t the Senate; non-germane amendments are out, even under an open rule). And most will fall when a majority decides they simply do not want to continue debating the bill; it’s still their prerogative to end debate largely whenever they want.

Open rules are refreshing, but even an hour of watching C-SPAN today should remind you that they are not a panacea for all reformist complaints about Congress. It takes a long time to do each amendment; many of them are parochial rather than big picture; and most of the ones that cut funding tend to stuff the funding somewhere else, instead of saving any money.

Still, this strikes me as a potentially durable institutional change in the House. With the final closing of the rules for all the appropriations bills in the 111th, it looked like the open rule process might be permanently dead. But if things go smoothly on H.R. 1, you might see the House leadership employ a large number of open rules in the 112th, which would at the very least be different, if not better or worse.

UPDATE: For those wondering about the title of this post, to “strike the last word” means to offer a pro-forma amendment such that you can get 5-minutes to speak on the actual amendment. Under the rules, only one 5-minute speech in support of an amendment and one 5-minute speech against it are allowed. But by motioning to “strike the last word,” you are technically offering a 2nd-degree amendment, which gives you five minutes. The 2nd degree amendment is never voted on, and after you are done the floor simply moves to the next person seeking to strike the last word.