Thomas Massie@RepThomasMassie
Can you, the people, “vote your way out of this?”
Honestly, not if you get your news from these folks.
The swamp has tricks for deceiving the public, and most even work on congressmen. Here’s an example of how Laura and Greg played along as happy tools of the swamp.
Please ask yourself why your own congressman has never talked about this. He either hasn’t gotten this far in the game (80% chance), or he likes the way the swamp obscures what’s going on (10% chance), or he dislikes the system but the price he’d pay for telling you is too high (10% chance). If a congressman sees this post and wants to debate me, I accept!
The House has rules we adopt at the beginning of each Congress. Honestly we should just use those - some go all the way back to Thomas Jefferson. Some are like Robert’s Rules of Order which branched from House rules a century ago. But we have a rules committee that modifies the rules every week. I served on the rules committee for two years. When I was on the committee, I refused to vote for rules changes if the purpose was to mislead or obscure. Every week, the rules committee bends the rules to suit the Speaker, but you can’t place the blame just on the committee or the Speaker. Every rules change must be approved by the whole House with a majority vote.
Rank and file congressmen are told to vote for these rules modifications each week for the sake of party loyalty because the rules are temporarily modified by the majority to keep the minority from using the permanent rules against us. This is partly true, so most congressmen never question beyond this.
Typically, every week the rules committee meets before other committees and writes a rules package to protect bills that will come to the floor that week. Then the whole house votes on this rules package early in the week before significant legislation comes to the floor. The vote is typically on party lines. Sometimes a block of congressmen in the majority will take the rules package hostage and withhold their vote to get something else that has nothing to do with the rules. I’m not a big fan of this, but after 13 years, my hands aren’t completely clean of this tactic.
The high-road position that I try to maintain is that if the rules package is bad, you shouldn’t vote for the rules package, and in general you shouldn’t withhold your vote from a rules package if there’s nothing wrong with the rules package… even if you disagree with the policy that is enabled to come to the floor by the rules package.
There are more details, but that’s all you need to know to understand what I’m going to explain next.
This week the Speaker wanted to do two things outside of our base rules, so he put those inside of the rules package that also had the rules for bringing bills like the popular SAVE Act to the floor, knowing members would be afraid to vote against something associated with SAVE. THIS IS INTENTIONAL.
The Speaker wanted to circumvent the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to avoid voting on tariffs and he wanted to turn off the ban on bringing a spending bill to the floor the same day it’s introduced.
The first rules package that came to the floor this week failed because myself and other republicans objected to it. The rules committee met again, wrote a new rules package without the tariff-trick, and we voted on the second rules package. I voted no but internet goons, like clockwork, characterized this as a vote against the SAVE Act.
The swamp used that second rules package to give them authority to pass a bill before anyone could read it. They hid that authority inside the rule for the SAVE act because they knew people like Laura and Greg would help them disparage anyone who didn’t go along.
If you fell for Laura and Greg’s slop you were cheering for the Pelosi doctrine that we should pass bills to see what’s in them. If the rules package had failed, the rules committee would have written a better one and SAVE Act would have still come to the floor.
