It’s Even Worse Than Minority Rule Now

Never before have so few members of Congress wielded such enormous power.

LEFT: U.S. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) talks to Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL). Photo credit: Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. RIGHT: Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala. Photo credit: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images.

Newspapers are filled with unprecedented headlines lately. Somehow, a small group of GOP extremists in the House has ground all budget legislation to a halt, likely leading to a shutdown of the government at the end of the month.

And in the Senate, somehow a single senator, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville, is holding up hundreds of military appointments. He’s blockaded Senate confirmations for six months, with no end in sight. It’s a debacle that will have repercussions for military readiness for years to come.

With these developments, we need to acknowledge a hard truth. It’s not just that we are governed by minority rule, as we’ve experienced with the Senate filibuster for the past two and a half years. We’re officially in a new era, where the shots are being called by a small cabal of radicals, or even by a single obstructionist senator.

And that is a dangerous and fundamentally undemocratic thing.

How is it that our democracy can be held hostage by such a small group of extremists? Why hasn’t the system found a way to correct this problem? And what if anything can be done to limit the damage and prevent such hostage taking in the future? These are the questions we’ll tackle in today’s piece.

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Cabal rule by House extremists

As predicted, the 2022 midterms flipped the House of Representatives to the GOP. But contrary to expectation, it was only by the tiniest margin. That narrow victory ironically handed an extraordinary amount of power to a small group of GOP representatives willing to withhold their votes for leverage. This tactic proved pivotal in the election of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House.

As you may recall, it took a modern-day record 15 rounds of balloting for McCarthy to finally gain a majority and claim the Speakership, even though his own party controlled the House. It was a humiliating and chaotic beginning to his tenure. Critically, to obtain the votes of the holdouts, McCarthy made some key concessions that have now come back around to bite.

One of those concessions was to grant a right to any single member to raise a “motion to vacate the char”—essentially a vote of no-confidence over the Speaker. When she held the gavel, Nancy Pelosi had essentially done away with the motion to vacate, requiring at least half of party members to agree to it. But extremists in the new House majority, as part of their conditions to support McCarthy, brought it back and lowered the threshold for the motion to just one member.

That meant anyone could stop McCarthy in his tracks, and should he lose the support of three others of his own House members (and should the Democrats vote as a group in favor of the motion to vacate as expected), McCarthy would be out of his job. That threat has led him to cave on nearly every demand the far-right extremists have ever made, from holding impeachment hearings on Joe Biden to reneging on the budget McCarthy and the White House had agreed to earlier this year.

Another major concession by McCarthy in exchange for his speakership was within the powerful Rules Committee. That committee is generally responsible for sending bills to the House floor. It is traditionally the way the Speaker controls the flow of legislation. Every House bill is brought into consideration by way of a rule resolution, so the Rules Committee normally gets to determine, at the pleasure and direction of the Speaker, what the entire legislative agenda for the House will be.

As a general matter, and by tradition, every member votes for the rules of their own party and against the rules of the opposing party. This is how the majority maintains its power. Give up power of the rules, and you give up power over the House.

And that’s where the problem now lies. A small group of extremists has seized upon the vulnerability of the rules resolution custom and has upended it utterly. Three times in the past few months, including twice in September alone, McCarthy has lost a basic rule vote to the rebels in his caucus, who crossed over to vote with the Democrats to sink the defense funding bill twice before it even got to the floor. In effect, McCarthy has lost control of the floor, and the extremists now have it.

The twin prongs of the motion to vacate and the rules rebellion have stripped McCarthy of any authority to move legislation forward. If McCarthy tries to work out a compromise within his own caucus, as he twice attempted last week, extremists from the right will kill the legislation during the rules vote. But if McCarthy dares to seek help from Democrats to pass legislation, such as the all-important appropriations bills to fund the government, then a mere handful of GOP members will seek to remove him as Speaker.

The upshot? McCarthy has become a SINO: a Speaker In Name Only. It is the cabal that is in charge.

Consensus action in the Senate destroyed

In the 2022 midterms, the House changed hands by a small number of seats, but voters weren’t prepared to hand the GOP control of both chambers of Congress. Instead, they voted strongly against extremist Senate candidates across the swing states. As a result, and to everyone's surprise, the Democrats actually increased their majority in the Senate by one seat with a pick-up in Pennsylvania.

In theory, even if new progressive legislation could not move forward because of GOP control of the House, the Democratic majority in the Senate should have allowed the body to proceed with the important business of confirming President Biden’s appointments to the courts and the military. 

Indeed, the American people well understand that whenever the Senate and the White House are held by the same party, the judiciary tends to become the focus, as the administration works with Senate leadership to fill vacancies. This can be a fraught and controversial process, especially when it comes to Supreme Court appointments, as we saw occur three times during Trump’s four years. Thanks to some very dirty tricks played by then-Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, Trump filled three vacancies and flipped the Court to a staunch 6-3 conservative majority.

Military appointments, on the other hand, have traditionally never been controversial, and its officers have usually been confirmed quickly, without fuss, and in a bipartisan manner. That is because the readiness of the military shouldn’t be a question of party politics or gamesmanship. Too much is on the line.

Enter Tommy Tuberville. The MAGA senator from Alabama decided that he strongly disapproved of the Pentagon’s policy of funding travel for pregnant service members who must go to other states to obtain abortion services. So Tuberville launched an unprecedented campaign to require roll call votes on every single appointment or promotion in the military that requires the Senate’s approval. 

So what’s the big deal? Is a roll call vote so out of the ordinary? 

In fact, it very much is. When a roll call is demanded, as is the right of any single senator, it takes up precious Senate time. Tuberville realized that he could abuse his right to demand a roll call by effectively requiring hundreds of them in succession, effectively placing a hold on the entire confirmation process for senior military promotions and appointments. 

Normally, the majority can get around a roll call demand by holding a series of votes to move a bill forward. This is time-consuming, but it can be done. The problem here is that Tuberville has risen to protest every single military promotion and appointment. To clear them all would take well over a hundred days, even if the Senate worked eight hours a day on nothing else.

This put Democrats in a bind. If they work to clear the backlog, there would be no time for any other Senate matters at all, including important judicial appointments and budget bills. But if they cave and allow Tuberville to dictate Pentagon policy through his blockade, they would reward his one-man obstructionist campaign, and this might encourage others to find other bad-faith ways to gum up the works.

Recently, Majority Leader Schumer moved three of the held-up appointments through, including the appointment of the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by way of procedural workarounds. Schumer threatened to hold the Senate in session over the weekend until at least those three went through. But that still left several hundred other military positions unfilled.

Tuberville continues to maintain a stranglehold on the process.

How can we fix this?

Because the House operates by majority rule via the Speaker and the Rules Committee, while the Senate operates by consensus and courtesy, both are vulnerable to being hijacked by bad actors. So long as a faction within the GOP can stop a rule vote from happening, the Speaker becomes powerless. And so long as a single senator can call for roll call votes, he can stop hundreds of military appointments from moving forward.

The experience with the House is instructive. The far-right factions gained so much power because they could build their attacks around specific flash points when their leverage would be maximized. Those points included the raising of the debt ceiling and the finalizing of the budget through appropriations bills. In both cases, any failure to move forward would put the economy at huge risk, and even the uncertainty of passage brought lasting economic headwinds.

One way to de-escalate and reduce the danger from extremism, then, is to remove the flashpoints where extremism gains its strongest footholds. In Congress, this happens twice annually now, once around the debt ceiling limit and once around appropriations. 

While Democrats may feel they gain politically from allowing chaos to reign across the aisle, the better and more lasting solution lies with a bipartisan effort to eliminate these flashpoints. Without an economic hostage to take, the budget process could proceed as it was intended: through bipartisan compromise. It was ultimately an agreement between the parties that averted economic catastrophe and lifted the debt ceiling, and it inevitably will be another agreement between the parties to pass the 12 appropriations bills needed to fund the government under the budget agreement agreed to earlier.

It so happens that a bipartisan working group already exists in one form in the House. It’s called the Problem Solvers Caucus, made up of 31 Democrats and 31 Republicans. And in light of McCarthy’s leadership failures, the Caucus is preparing to propose its own continuing resolution to fund the government through the middle of January while the parties work to pass the appropriations bill. 

And here’s a bonus: The Problem Solvers’ proposed legislation is in the form of a “discharge petition,” which means that if a majority of the House members agree, it can be “discharged” from committee and go straight to the House floor, bypassing the now dysfunctional and extremist-controlled Rules Committee. That process is rare and cumbersome, but it’s available. And if it’s available to pass the budget or a continuing resolution, it’s available to enact reforms to the process.

Over in the Senate, that body may need to seriously reconsider its own rules that permit single-member obstruction. A change in Senate rules doesn’t happen often, but it only requires a majority of the chamber to vote in favor of it. 

In this case, it may be wise to consider that times have changed and that Senate trolls like Tuberville are growing in number and frequency of election. Because it takes at least 60 senators to end a filibuster, that same number in theory ought to be able to shut down any kind of shenanigans of the sort Tuberville has launched and so far maintained. If the Senate wishes to continue to operate through collegiality, anything that can get 60 votes behind it should be given deference. That includes ending the kinds of appointment holds put in place by Tuberville.

These are not by any means easy solutions in either chamber, nor are they the only ones. Changes to how and where ultimate power is vested doesn’t come easily. It would take a concerted, bipartisan effort to reform the system. Somewhat ironically, now may be the moment for this, right as the Republicans have grown tired of having their chamber hijacked. Perhaps enough of them will be amenable to common sense rule changes.

It would also take Democrats, working across the aisle and willing to bail out failed GOP leadership, to make this happen in the House. But this is not so far-fetched as it sounds. Already once this year, Speaker McCarthy has had to rely upon Democrats to save his budget compromise on the debt ceiling bill, and he may need them again to have any hope of holding onto his speakership. 

And in exchange for their support, Democrats could insist upon some changes of their own.