Building on the discussion begun earlier, I'd like to address the notion -- which I believe is less-than-accurate -- that a vote for the rule was a vote to fund the war in Afghanistan.
I don't know whether this claim has its roots entirely in the confusion surrounding the self-executing provisions of the rule, or whether it stems from a mechanical but not contextual understanding of what special rules do and how they're used in the House. If I had to guess, I'd say it was a combination of the two. But in any case, I have some exception to take with the idea that voting for the rule was the functional equivalent of voting to fund the war. There is a small point in the idea, but taken in political context, I think it virtually disappears.
First of all, the rule didn't fund the war any more than holding the 2008 elections did. Or continuing to cut paychecks to Members of Congress from the U.S. Treasury did. Or for that matter, than voting on any other bill before Congress ever did.
You fund the war by voting to fund the war. And mechanically speaking, there's no way a House Resolution (the form in which all special rules come to the floor) can actually fund a war. Only appropriations bills can fund anything, and to do so they have to be passed in identical form in both houses of Congress and be signed by the President (discounting for the sake of argument the other constitutional paths a bill can take to becoming law without the President's approval). House Resolutions aren't statutory, and they're not legally binding. So in the strictest possible sense, there is simply no way a rule can fund a war.
So right off the bat, the position that argues that the rule funded the war begins as a metaphorical position. "It might as well have funded the war." Or, "for all practical purposes, it funded the war." Only neither of these are that much more true than the idea that the rule really did fund the war.
Why not? Because there was another parliamentary maneuver considerably more responsible for funding the war, and which was much closer to being the "proximate cause" of the war funding being advanced. That was the House's decision to proceed with further consideration of the supplemental by taking up a motion to agree to the Senate amendment to the bill.
A refresher, from the earlier post:
Remember that the supplemental, H.R. 4899, was passed first (without war funding) back in March, and sent to the Senate for its consideration. The Senate amended the bill, adding the war funds, and passed their version in late May. The two versions being in disagreement and the Senate insisting on its amendment, a conference was requested. The House, however, declined to take up the question of convening a conference and instead opted to further amend the bill.
Having decided not to pursue a conference at this point, the House had the options of either: 1) refusing to take further action on the bill; 2) taking a vote on agreeing to the Senate amendment without further amendment, and letting the bill sink or swim on its merits as then written by the Senate, or; 3) agreeing to the Senate amendment with a further amendment of its own, sending the bill back for another round on the other side of the Capitol. In scenario 1, of course, the House does nothing, and no bill is passed. In scenarios 2 and 3, the House acts, but the question is on a motion to agree to the Senate amendment, and not on the bill itself. Accepting the Senate amendment without further amendment has the effect of putting the two houses in agreement, which for constitutional purposes means it's ready to be enrolled and sent to the President for signature. But further amending it keeps the houses in disagreement. But in none of the above scenarios is there required a vote on "final passage" of the bill in the way there was during its initial consideration in the House. And that's not because of any self-executing provisions of the rule, but because there's a motion under consideration and not a bill.
So to recap, the House passed a supplemental with no war money and sent it to the Senate. The Senate amended the supplemental and added war money. The House then agreed to consider a motion to agree to the Senate amendment with amendments of its own. That has the effect of putting the two houses in agreement (at least temporarily, and as a starting point) on the question of adding war funding. The House then gave itself an opportunity to pull back from that agreement by considering three different amendments, each of which would have modified the war funding provisions to one degree or another, including one that would have eliminated it entirely.
That's the only sense in which it's possible to say the rule funded the war. That is, that the rule allowed for the consideration of the motion to agree to the Senate amendments, and then to consider further amendments. Without the rule clearing the way for the motion to agree to the Senate amendments, war funding does not advance.
So isn't it fair, then, to say the rule (at least for all practical purposes) really did fund the war? Or at least clear the way for that funding?
Well, it's fair to say that the rule cleared the way for making the addition of that funding the baseline from which the House would continue its amending work, yes. But again, no rule can by itself add war funding. Even a self-executing rule can't do it without including within its text the adoption of a motion to do so. If there had been such a self-executing provision, people blaming the funding on the rule would be much closer to being right. But there was no such provision.
Why, then, did the House do that? Why would they agree right off the bat to the Senate amendment that added the war funding, and then require an affirmative majority vote to remove or restrict any of it? Why not reverse it, and require an affirmative vote to add it in?
That question requires looking back at what the House's options were when the Senate handed the bill back to them. Was there something the House could have tried to do to kill funding for real, besides what they did? Yes, they could have implemented option #1 from the quoted passage above, and refused to take up the supplemental at all, at the cost of all the additional domestic spending that progressives wanted. And it's possible to consider that a fair trade, of course.
The other thing they could have done would have been to vote on a motion simply disagreeing to the Senate amendments and agreeing to a conference, and then insisting in conference on the original House position, which was that there be no war funding in the supplemental. Getting that bill out of conference and back to a vote, though, would have required the agreement of the Senate conferees, who would have been representing the Senate position, i.e., that there ought to be at least $33 billion in war funding in there. Unless you can get a majority of the Senate conferees to agree with the (theoretical) House position that there should be no war funding at all (or some other compromise, for that matter), then you never get the signatures you need to complete the conference report, and the bill never advances. For war funding opponents whose primary mission was to deny those funds (regardless of the cost in domestic relief), that would doubtless have been an acceptable outcome.
Another available option, of course, were to simply agree to the Senate amendment (option #2, above) and have an up-or-down vote on the bill with the war funding the Senate added, but no further changes to domestic funding, and see if the House accepted or rejected it.
But because House Dems wanted more domestic spending added, they needed to put that proposal in play for any potential conference or further "ping-ponging" of the bill back and forth between the houses. Procedurally, that means moving to agree to the Senate amendment with the House's own amendments, in order to put the additional funding within the scope of the conference, and then try to stand firm on the original House position on war funding, if they were so inclined. That was option #3, from above.
Could the House have made a motion to disagree to the Senate amendments with an amendment of their own, so that they were not on record as having first accepted the Senate's war funding as a baseline? I don't believe so. The houses were already in disagreement by virtue of the Senate's amendment. The options available, then, were to agree wholly, to agree with new amendments, to acknowledge the continuing disagreement and agree to a conference, or to do nothing.
Why can't the House just disagree to the Senate amendment and then propose more amendments of its own? Well, from a procedural standpoint, that's nonsensical. Disagreeing is fine, but disagreeing and adding more amendments isn't an option that's available, since that would simply be the same thing as disregarding the other house's action, which they can't do. The bill has been amended, and the House has to deal with it as it stands. It can't simply pretend that the Senate's amendment doesn't exist. It can "agree" to it and then adopt an amendment removing it completely, but it has to agree first that the Senate has done this thing, accept it as the working document, and then take up whatever remedy it thinks is suitable. In this case, the votes were there for the first part (agreeing to the Senate's amendment so that it could be used as the working document), but not for the second part (amending the Senate's addition of war funding). The evidence is before you in the form of the roll call votes from Thursday evening.
So that's the sense in which the additional domestic spending House Dems wanted was the reason for their agreement to go forward with the process, which had the effect of keeping the Senate amendments (which added the war money) alive.
What about the proposition of simply defeating the rule, so that the motion to agree to the Senate amendment is never made?
Defeating the rule would indeed have temporarily blocked the House from formally agreeing to the Senate amendment, at least in the form proposed by the Rules Committee, because the leadership never likes to bring a bill or motion like this one to the floor without a rule establishing the parameters of debate. That's because debate on the floor that takes place without the guidance of a special rule is held under the default Standing Rules of the House. And that kind of open debate can be nearly endless, and opens the measure up to any and all amendments until such time as a majority might agree to cut off debate by calling the previous question.
So the "real life" contextual answer to what happens if a rule is defeated is that the leadership delays bringing the bill or motion to the floor until it can engineer a deal for a different rule. In this case, it would have meant that the leadership would have come back to the floor with a new rule that it thought it could pass. And what might such a rule have looked like? I think that a rule simply accepting the Senate's war funding amendment and affording no opportunity at all for a recorded vote on rescinding or restricting any part of it could have met with the approval of enough Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats to win. Which would have meant the negotiations between the houses would be over and the bill would be signed without there ever having been an opportunity to vote on cutting those funds, or for that matter to add any of the domestic spending other House Democrats thought was important enough that they were willing to agree to the Senate amendment as a starting point.
The operative fact here is that defeating the rule doesn't kill the bill. It makes the leadership search for a different rule.
And the bottom line, again, is this: you fund the war by voting to fund the war. The next rule the House would likely have seen would have been one that facilitated that vote an no others.
Is that the only possible outcome? Of course not. But getting to a different answer means illustrating a different calculus. The roll call votes from Thursday show us precisely how many votes there are for the various degrees of restriction on war funding. Can anyone propose a new and different way for a restricting proposal to get to a majority?