As it scrambled to pass a continuing resolution and avoid a government shutdown at the end of 2024, the 118th Congress ended much as it began—with serious doubts as to whether America’s legislature can rise to the level of bare competence. The House of Representatives is mainly adrift because of the difficulties Republicans had in electing a Speaker in January 2023 and the consequences of that struggle for the House Rules Committee. Understanding the House’s current malaise requires understanding the degraded state of its deliberations, which in turn requires digging into the nitty-gritty of how it considers bills.
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Until this Congress, textbooks of procedure could straightforwardly explain that small and uncontroversial bills would be moved through suspension, while big and controversial bills would move under procedures agreed to by the Rules Committee. These rules are endlessly adaptable. They can allow for lots of debate and consideration of amendments (usually when the House organizes itself as the Committee of the Whole), or they can shut off debate entirely and force members to vote. In teeing up a bill for consideration, they have traditionally also debated many of the substantive issues implicated, offering a “dress rehearsal” for the floor debate itself in a way that ought to improve deliberation.
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Most of [Speaker Mike] Johnson’s colleagues find him more attentive than McCarthy, but in practice Johnson has done anything but decentralize. Under his leadership, the House depended on suspension to move several pieces of controversial legislation, including the continuing resolution that averted a government shutdown in late December 2024—the final version of which was introduced about an hour before the vote on final passage. Member input in the final stages of the legislative process occurs almost exclusively by bending the ears of top leaders, with amendments mostly prohibited.
Because passage under suspension requires the support of two-thirds of members, some may wonder if there’s anything wrong with relying on it to move legislation through the House. These defenders might point out that although suspension leaves little room for floor debates and cuts off all possibility of amendment, neither of those activities has been constructive in recent years. Yes, suspension minimizes formalities, but plenty of informal deliberation can still occur between legislators both in the public sphere and privately. Negotiation is alive and well behind the scenes.
The problem with this defense is that it requires we place extraordinary trust in our top partisan leaders, who decide among themselves what ought to be in the bills that will be rushed to passage. And, to put the matter gently, we are not in a high-trust moment. When matters are decided behind closed doors, many citizens suspect they are being sold out—and plenty of members are willing to voice those concerns. Given how little input most members have into the content of final deals, it is unsurprising that they object to the whole process.
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Withered deliberation is at the heart of many of our most intractable policy issues. The Congress’s ability to deal with immigration and border security, for example, has been poisoned by immigration hawks’ decades-long sense that their perspective was being systematically excluded from debate by bien-pensant dealmakers who derided critics as racists or xenophobes. Even when leaders have supported big deals (as in 2007 and 2018), they have not structured the process to include all voices, and the hawks have found various ways to tank their vaunted bipartisan deals.
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And what of the Rules Committee itself in the 119th? As of this writing, it is still without a chair; the expectation is that the dissidents will keep their three seats, though Massie may be swapped out for a substitute. The need to pass a Republican president’s agenda may tamp down on dissent, but Republicans’ highest hope seems to be docility. Despite the many tensions between factions in their ultra-thin majority, there is little sense of the need for deliberation, either in the committee itself or on the floor. By neglecting the need to work through difficulties through open debate, Republicans are setting themselves up for explosive failures on the floor.