Committee of the Whole

Herein is a short explanation of the very strange thing they do in the House of Representatives when they vote  whether to pass a law.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it say anything about majorities. It says in every session the members of the House of Representatives and Senate shall choose their leadership.

Contrary to those like Judge Neal Gorsuch, who espouses belief in understanding and being able to divine “the original intent” of the drafters of the Constitution, the well and long established historic truth is they never imagined, envisioned, wanted or made room in that document for a two-party system.

Even though they were divided crosswise — slave states and free states, small states and large states — in drafting the document, the 39 men who signed the Constitution never contemplated that the national government would quickly descend into partisanship, much less the kind of partisan warfare that afflicts the government and the nation today.

They did not see a two-party system coming. George Washington hated it when it happened and it happened in his very first term as the nation’s very first president. That’s the story, you know, about Alexander Hamilton on the one side and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on the other. It’s a very pricey ticket on Broadway; it’s led to a ticket no one can get punched in Washington.

In the fractious two-party system into which our constitutional government quickly evolved, the House and Senate meet a constitutional obligation to choose the leadership of each house after every election. The new, incoming House and Senate majorities and minorities meet soon after the election, even before taking office, for each party to choose its leaders in each house; and then meet on the first day of the new session to elect the presiding officers of the chambers – the speaker in the House, the majority leader in the Senate.

Of course the party with the most votes in each house, the majority, carries the day and elects their choices for speaker and majority leader. Sometimes, like now, one party controls both chambers. Sometimes there is a split.

But from those two choices flow all the rest as to control of committees, designation of committee chairmen, control of the, rules, the process, the chamber itself and of course all legislation.

It takes a majority of the House, 218 of its 435 members, to elect a speaker. But it does not necessarily take 218 votes to pass a bill in the House.

This could become exceedingly important as the Congress hurtles form one disaster to the next in the coming months, not unlike the one witnessed on the dreadful health care legislation.

You might have noticed that the media kept reporting it would take 216 votes to pass that terrible health care bill. Why is the number 216 when there are 435 seats in the House and the majority needed to elect the speaker to control the chamber is 218?

Because when the House takes up a bill for a final vote it first votes to make itself into “a committee of the whole”, in other words it becomes not the House of Representatives but a committee of the House of Representatives.

Then because all that is required to move a bill out of committee is a simple majority, by acting as a committee of the House rather than as the House of Representatives, it requires only a majority of the then sitting membership to pass something, anything.

Otherwise it becomes more difficult to get to a majority when there are vacancies in House seats and for one reason or another — deaths, resignations — there are almost always vacancies. What gives the House the authority to do this? The Constitution. It leaves it to the House and Senate to devise their own rules.

There are presently five vacancies in the House, four because President Trump appointed four former members elected last Nov. 8 to this House to his administration. The fifth  seat  belonged to a Democrat, Xavier Becerra, who resigned to become attorney general of California after Sen. Kamala Harris, the former holder of that office, left that post to take the U.S. Senate seat she won last November.

Would  those four departed House Republicans  have made a difference on the health bill? No. The bill still would not have had the votes and none from those four, one of whom, for example, is Mike Mulvaney, who left the House to become Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Yes, the same guy who came up with eliminating Meals on Wheels. Not like Mr. Mulvaney would vote to spend a dime on someone’s health care, except his own and that of his family.

So, instead of 435 sitting members there were 430 actual members of the House when the health bill pended a vote. With the House having put itself into “committee of the whole” mode, a House majority to pass a bill is, for now, 216 votes as it would have been had the House voted on the Trump/Ryancare legislation.

So keep an eye on how many vacancies there are in the House from time to time because that will tell you how many votes it will take for whatever legislation is attempted during this session of Congress in the first two years of the Trump presidency — in the exceedingly unlikely event this congress can pass any consequential legislation.