Let's hear it for the House, which absolutely tore through a schedule packed to the rafters with suspensions bills. Now it's on to more complicated business, though it certainly makes my job of pasting links into these posts a hell of a lot easier. But don't worry, I'll make up the volume by explaining parliamentary procedure you probably don't care about and may never see. But boy, if you do, won't you feel smart?

One notable miss along the way: the failure of H.R. 6604, the House version of the energy speculation bill, which went down by a vote of 276-151. How do you lose a vote with numbers like that? Bring the bill under suspension of the rules, which requires a 2/3 vote to pass. Seems about a dozen or so Republicans switched their votes from yea to nay at the last minute, to make sure the bill didn't actually pass. Apparently the folks back home wanted a yea vote to curb speculation, but the Republicans were only willing to give it to them if they knew it wouldn't matter and the bill would fail. Republicans are betting the ranch on being able to say the Congress isn't acting on energy issues, and these 12 decided to go down with the ship.

Why use the suspension procedure for a bill that has 276 votes but not 290 (2/3 of a full House)? Suspensions can't be amended and aren't subject to motions to recommit. (Remember our old friend, the motion to recommit? Here it is, biting us in the ass again.) The fear was that under regular order, Republicans would have offered a motion to recommit that would have lifted offshore drilling bans, and enough Democrats would have crossed over to support it that it would have passed.

So instead, the speculation bill in the House requires 2/3 to pass, and goes down, while over in the Senate -- where we've unfortunately grown used to such supermajority requirements by now -- their bill also went down, though it needed just 3/5 (the famed 60 votes) to get past the filibuster.

Today in the House, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:

FLOOR SCHEDULE FOR THURSDAY, JULY 31, 2008

House meets at 10:00 a.m.: Legislative Business
Ten "One Minutes" Per Side
Last vote predicted: ??? [No kidding. It really says that.]

Conference Report on H.R. 4137 - The Higher Education Opportunity Act (Rep. George Miller (CA) – Education and Labor) (Subject to a Rule)

H.R. 1338 - Paycheck Fairness Act (Rep. DeLauro – Education and Labor) (Subject to a Rule)

H.R. 6599 - The Military Construction and Veterans Affairs FY09 Appropriations bill (Rep. Edwards (TX) – Appropriations) (Subject to a Rule)

• Conference Reports may be brought up at any time.
• Motions to go to Conference should they become available.
• Possible Motions to Instruct Conferees.

For weeks now I've been including the Majority Leader's warning that conference reports may be brought up at any time. Well, now's the time. A look back at This Week in Congress will show you that this conference report wasn't on the schedule at all, and now here it is. Conference reports are highly privileged matters, meaning they can jump to the head of the line when they're sent back to the House and Senate. With all the work invested in passing bills in both houses and then hammering out an agreement in the areas where the two versions differ, the Members don't want any more delay than necessary in getting a final version passed and shipped off to the White House for the president (and his crayon) to veto. Well, OK, probably not this bill. But the president is sharpening the crayon in anticipation of the other two bills on the House schedule for today, both of which are under veto threat.

Yes, the president says he's going to veto the Veterans Affairs appropriations bill. Just like last year.

Some notes on the other bills listed:

H.R. 1338: Six amendments will be permitted (in the lingo, these are amendments made "in order") under this structured rule.

H.R. 6599: This bill comes to the floor under an open rule modified open rule, which accounts for the "???" as the predicted time of the last vote, listed above. With an open a modified open rule, you don't know how many amendments you're going to get. The only limitation is that they be submitted in time to be pre-printed in the Congressional Record before the day of the debate, meaning the deadline was yesterday.

The only exception to the pre-printing rule that might crop up is the offering of pro-forma amendments. You'll occasionally see this procedure used when debating bills under open rules, and the tip-off for C-SPAN watchers is when Members begin their remarks by telling the Chair that they "move to strike the last word." The "last word" they're "striking" (deleting) is the last word of the amendment previously under debate. The word isn't actually deleted though, since there's no vote held on the motion. But by making such a motion, technically there's a new amendment under consideration (because it's worded differently than the previous one -- it's one word shorter). Under an open rule, the default conditions of debate in the Committee of the Whole (which is just what it sounds like) apply, meaning the "five minute rule" is in effect.

By the way, why bother with a Committee of the Whole if it's just a fake "committee" made up of everybody in the House? Because the House default rule analogous to the Committee's "five minute rule" is the "one hour rule." And you don't want to be messing with no damn one hour rule when you could be using the five minute rule. Why not just change the one hour rule to the five minute rule? I don't know. Go away.

So... if you strike the last word (or if you're the second person to do this in a row, technically you want to strike the last two words, or just the "requisite number of words," whatever number that may be), then you're talking about a new amendment, and you're entitled to five minutes to speak on it, and someone else gets five to speak against it. In reality, though, you're going to talk about something else, since your amendment is just a technicality you used to get some floor time.

For some reason, this is actually considered more orderly and desirable than just saying, "Hey, can I get some more time over here?".

Anyway...

In the Senate, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:

Convenes: 9:30am

Period of morning business until 10:30am with the Majority controlling the first half and the Republicans controlling the final half.

10:30am Resume consideration of the motion to proceed to S.3001, the DOD [Department of Defense] Authorization bill.

10:30am - 12:30pm 30-minute alternating blocks of time with the Republicans controlling the first 30 minutes and the Majority controlling the next 30 minutes.

Roll Call Votes are possible during Thursday's session.

The Senate stalemate over "energy issues" (read: Republican fantasies that they'll find oil under the seat cushions) continues, with Republicans blocking votes on everything, including the media shield and the tax provision extenders bills. Next up for the GOP filibuster test: Defense authorization (that is, the kind of bill that if a Democrat voted against it, there'd be ads in their state saying they "don't support the troops"). Of course, if Dems had voted against the tax extenders bill, they'd be hit with ads saying they "voted to increase taxes," since what's getting extended in the bill is mostly credits and other incentives (though there are also some increases in there to offset the extensions of the cuts). So I'm doubting that the fact that DOD authorization is about defense will break them. They'll probably filibuster that, just the same.

On the Radar (but outside of Congress): Sen. Ted Stevens is scheduled to be arraigned today in federal court, before Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.

Or at least, that's what he wants you to believe, bizarrely enough.

CQ Politics:

A potential revolt by a group of Democrats pressed party leaders into compromising on a rewrite of electronic surveillance rules that could come to a House vote by week's end, a top Democrat said Wednesday.

Asked why Democrats don’t put aside the surveillance legislation until a new president is elected in November, Hoyer said he would prefer to do so, but can’t because so many House Democrats are prepared to vote for the Senate bill that he and other top House Democrats oppose.

“Clearly enough Democrats have indicated in the House they would vote for the Senate bill if it came to the floor. The alternatives are either the Senate bill or a bill significantly better” reached through negotiations with the Senate and the White House, he said.

“Many Democrats have indicated to me they are willing to wait as long as an alternative is in sight. If not, they are prepared to vote for the Senate bill,” Hoyer said.

Question: Why would "so many House Democrats" be clamoring for the Senate bill, when the last time the Senate bill was in the House, they voted to send it back, amended, without immunity in it?

Question: How will "enough Democrats" vote for the Senate bill if it isn't on the floor? That bill only gets to the floor two ways: 1) Steny Hoyer brings it there, or; 2) a majority of the House signs a discharge petition to bring it there.

There is a third way, of course, and that's for the Republicans to attempt a motion to recommit some other bill with instructions to tack on the text of the Senate FISA bill. But I haven't seen a germane bill on the near horizon on the schedule for them to try this with.

No Democrats have signed the discharge petition -- ironically filed by disgraced, two-timing daddy Vito Fossella, who probably wishes he still had the privacy he's trying to strip from you -- so how is that Senate bill going to get to the floor?

Question: If it does get to the floor via discharge petition, will we be entitled to ask whether or not Steny Hoyer the "leader" of this majority?

Latest reports are that, once again, a FISA "deal" may be in the works:

According to sources familiar with the negotiations, the compromise would be very similar to the last proposal by Sen. Christopher S. Bond , D-Mo. [sic], to House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer , D-Md.

Sources said the major change is that a federal district court, not the secret FISA court itself, would make an assessment about whether to provide retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies being sued for their alleged role in the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program.

It was not immediately clear, however, what standard the court would use to determine whether retroactive legal immunity was justified. If that standard is too low, civil liberties advocates maintain, the law will have been written so that companies are almost assured of being granted immunity, and any claim of court scrutiny is a mirage. One source said the court would review whether there was "substantial evidence" that the companies had received assurances from the government that the administration’s program was legal.

What the substantive change to the "deal" may mean, though, is that the legal whitewash gets relocated from the FISA court to federal district court.

But wasn't that one of the boogeymen the Republicans have been tearing their hair out about all along? That everything had to be super-duper secret? Yes it was. And the reason they're not concerned about moving this determination from the FISC to district court is that there will be no substantive ruling made on the legality of the program. The bill will most likely restrict the court to making one decision and one decision only: did the President or the Attorney General show the telecoms a piece of paper that said the President said this was OK, or not?

Not whether he had the right to cook up such a paper. And not whether there was even anything on the paper. Just did they show them a paper, and if so, then -- bam! -- immunity.

Thanks, Congress!

Or perhaps more accurately, it turns out, thanks to Steny Hoyer.

Hoyer has been pushing for a deal on FISA all along, presumably in an effort to protect the right flank of Congressional Democrats, and House Blue Dogs in particular. But Capitol Hill and interest group sources who have been closely monitoring the issue say that both Hoyer's interest in concluding a deal quickly and his preferred procedure on the bill are being driven by fears of losing control of the issue entirely. Specifically, a discharge petition that deal proponents claim is gaining momentum (it's not -- it's had a grand total of three signatures added in all of May and June combined), and his insistence that the Senate take up a bill previously passed in the House and amend it with the language of the deal, then send it back to the House in order to avoid subjecting it to a motion to recommit (about which, see more here).

By the way, I just can't pass up this irony: The discharge petition in question was filed by Rep. Vito Fossella. A guy who, it's probably be safe to say, might since starting his petition have rediscovered the value of personal privacy. But I'm sure at the time he was a hard and fast proponent of the "I have nothing to hide" school of civil liberties.

Both fears, though, are indicative of two things: 1) that there may in fact be no "deal," and; 2) that Hoyer has lost his ability to drive the House Democratic caucus and its floor agenda.

Why do I say that? Well, Hoyer certainly can't be faulted for fearing Democratic defections on a Republican motion to recommit. It happens all the time (though some, with whom I agree, think it should be extremely rare). But if he's afraid that Republicans will blow the whole thing up with a stunt like that, then he's got no "deal," has he?

What a lesson in the futility of seeking "bipartisan compromise" with this gang that would be, eh?

And if he's genuinely afraid that Democrats will defect and sign a discharge petition on something this hot, well, that says an awful lot about the current state of party discipline, not to mention the loyalties of the Blue Dogs he's so determined to protect with this "deal." Signing a discharge petition like this one used to ensure you'd be kneecapped before lunch.

That weakness puts Hoyer in an equally weak position with the Senate, on whom he'd like to prevail to bail him out of the procedural nightmare of the motion to recommit (which he shouldn't have anyway -- especially if there's a real deal with Republicans). Now it may turn out that the Senate Dems are just as eager to get this done as Hoyer is. But if they're tired of being the first movers in this continuing circus -- and despite the willingness of many Senate Dems to cave, several of them do seem to be holding their noses when they do it -- let them recognize that Hoyer's drowning here, and simply opt not to throw him a life preserver.

Hey, remember that parliamentary pain in the ass, the motion to recommit? And remember how Republicans have been using it to create political annoyances, and even succeeding in using them to make Democrats destroy their own legislation?

Well, someone's had quite enough of that:

May 6, 2008

Dear Democratic Colleague:

I appreciate your support for my legislation to cancel the debts of the world's poorest countries, H.R. 2634, the Jubilee Act. I am confident that the passage of this legislation will make a real difference in the lives of millions of impoverished people around the world. Nevertheless, I was puzzled by the large number of Democrats who voted for the Republican motion to recommit during consideration of this legislation.

I am especially distraught that individual Democrats who voted in favor of the Republican motion to recommit did not obtain clarification from Chairman Barney Frank or myself regarding our position on this motion. It is important that Members of the Democratic Caucus have a level of trust and respect for one another that would lead them to consult with the authors of legislation prior to voting for Republican amendments, especially motions to recommit.

Unlike other types of amendments, motions to recommit are offered without advance notice to the majority party; are not pre-printed in the Congressional Record; and are not subject to vetting by the authors of the legislation, the leaders of the committee of jurisdiction, or members of the Rules Committee. Consequently, it is not surprising that Members discovered after the passage of the Jubilee Act that the motion to recommit was drafted improperly and needed to be corrected by a unanimous consent request the week after the passage of the bill.

I am also concerned that the Chair of the Democratic Caucus was one of the Members of the Caucus who organized the "yea" votes, despite the fact that an aide to the Chair was quoted in The Hill as saying the Chair voted "yea" by mistake.

I realize that this was only the most recent of many instances in which Members of the Democratic Caucus have voted for Republican motions to recommit. However, as I watched Democratic leaders organize "yea" votes on this motion, I was convinced that Democrats are traveling down a path of complicity on motions to recommit the likes of which we have never seen before. I cannot help but wonder if our Caucus will be torn apart by frequent support for Republican motions to recommit. I find myself wondering, "Where will this end?"

I appreciate the attention of my Democratic colleagues to these concerns, and I look forward to our discussing a consistent, unified approach by our Caucus towards Republican motions to recommit. I believe this is a discussion the Democratic Caucus should have as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

/s Maxine Waters

Member of Congress

Did you catch that?

I am also concerned that the Chair of the Democratic Caucus was one of the Members of the Caucus who organized the "yea" votes, despite the fact that an aide to the Chair was quoted in The Hill as saying the Chair voted "yea" by mistake.

Yow! That's Rahm Emanuel she's talking about there, who's regarded as one of the architects of the Democrats' tactical use of the motion to recommit in the 109th Congress. The success Democrats had in forcing the Republicans to vote against those motions -- and then later running against those bad votes and taking control of the House inn 2006 -- has left Dems worried that the same tactic can be used against them in 2008. And it's true. Minus the fact that the Republican brand is in such tatters that it won't matter, of course.

So what, exactly, was the problem with the motion to recommit on the Jubilee Act that Rep. Waters identified? Well, in an attempt at setting up another "gotcha" moment, Republicans thought they'd force a vote on the restriction that no debt relief ought to go to any country that has business dealings with Iran.

Of course, that's exactly the deal Condoleezza Rice is trying to cut for Iraq, which has both enormous debt and significant business dealings with Iran. But never mind that. While it's true that Iraq's debt wasn't covered by this bill, Iraq's problem is just a matter logic and consistency, and the "administration" and its enablers don't care about that stuff.

But the fact is, the motion was so sloppily drafted and so poorly researched that it ended up killing major portions of the underlying bill,  even though the majority of Republicans in the House agreed with its intent. It was so bad, in fact, that the House ended up having to go back a week later and remove the changes made by the motion by unanimous consent. Unanimous consent! Even the authors of the motion to recommit knew they'd screwed it up badly enough that it needed fixing.

Just watch Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) explaining the situation:

So as stupid as these motions are, the worry they create ends up driving Democrats to destroy the village in order to save it. They gut their own legislation, or end up agreeing to attach provisions odious enough to make the rest of us wish they'd just gut it, all in the hopes of avoiding "gotcha" campaign ads that are probably coming no matter what.

Meanwhile, what's happening out in the real world?

Republicans are losing critical special elections deep in their own territory, running campaigns trying to scare people with terrorism and/or immigration, accusing Dems of not "supporting the troops," and even tying them to the very frightening Barack Obama. And none of it is working with the electorate.

Democrats unafraid to run as Democrats are winning at the voting booths. The DCCC, which Rahm Emanuel no longer runs, is on a hot streak, winning three heavily Republican seats in special elections in the past two months. Meanwhile, the Democratic Caucus, which Rahm Emanuel does run, can't get out of its own way for fear of becoming vulnerable to Republican attack ads that haven't worked in any of those special elections.

Hmm.

Shh! Don't stop me, I think I'm learning something...

Well, OK, it's not pandemonium. But guess what? House Republicans are being petulant children again, and they're using the House procedural rules to play their games.

And you'll never guess what procedural device they're using to make their mischief.

Remember the motion to recommit? It's back (it never left, actually), and it's at the center of an annoying time-waster of a trick that looks like it's going to become standard Republican operating procedure for the next few weeks.

Here's what's happening.

At the end of consideration of pretty much any bill of any substance on any issue, a Republican offers a motion to recommit the bill to committee, with instructions to strike out everything in it and substitute in its place the text of the Senate-passed FISA bill -- the one with retroactive amnesty for the telecom companies.

It doesn't matter, for the Republicans' purposes, that the bill they're trying to pull this trick on has nothing whatsoever to do with FISA, electronic surveillance, or any related topic.

It matters to the rules, of course. And so every time, without fail, a Democrat raises a point of order (definition) against the motion, as non-germane (definition). The presiding officer sustains the point of order -- because it's quite correct and the Republicans know it. Still, each time the Republicans appeal the ruling of the chair (definition). That prompts the Democrats to move to table the appeal (definition), on which the House then holds a vote.

Democrats call this vote what it is: a procedural vote to sustain the actual rules of the House. The motion, if offered to a housing bill, a health care bill, or the AmeriCorps reauthorization bill -- as it has been over the past few days -- isn't germane.

Republicans, though, call this vote what they wish it was: a vote on the FISA amendments and telecom immunity, no doubt planning to tell people in upcoming attack ads that Democrat X voted "to weaken America" N number of times.

So in the end, the Republicans don't succeed in actually getting a vote on, much less passing, the Senate FISA bill. But they get to make trouble, rack up Democratic votes against it, and in fact end up getting a second bite at the motion to recommit apple, since the first one they offered was ruled out of order.

And that's where Republicans have been making even more trouble. During consideration of H.R. 3521, the Public Housing Asset Management Improvement Act, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) first offered the non-germane FISA motion, got shot down, lost the appeal vote, and was dispensed with. But once he was done, Michelle "Points for Putting Her Vomit in Contact with Jean Schmidt" Bachmann (R-MN) offered a motion to recommit, to add provisions invalidating public housing regulations prohibiting firearms possession.

Agree? Disagree? It doesn't really matter, because Bachmann's motion was written in a way that wouldn't let you agree, even if you wanted to -- as Steny Hoyer tried to do. That's because her motion instructed the committee to report her changes back "promptly," as opposed to "forthwith." A full explanation of the difference can be found here, but the basic deal is this: If your motion says "forthwith," that means they just pretend to send the bill back to committee, but really just make the damn change right there, and then vote on it right away with the changes. But if your motion says "promptly," the bill actually does go back to committee, where it basically dies.

So you see, it doesn't even matter whether you agreed with Bachmann or not. She wouldn't let you. Here's what happened when Hoyer tried to work things out with her:

Mr. HOYER. I thank the gentlelady.

Would the gentlelady agree to a unanimous consent request to make your amendment a forthwith amendment so that it could be voted upon? My presumption is the gentlelady wants the amendment adopted, the gentlelady believes the majority of the House is for it. Would the gentlelady agree to such a unanimous consent?

Mrs. BACHMANN. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the request from the majority leader; however, the answer would be no.

We are aware of this problem, and it's very important that we send this back to the committee so that it will be fixed.

Mr. HOYER. Reclaiming my time, so it's more important to delay it than to adopt it now?

Mrs. BACHMANN. Madam Speaker and Majority Leader, as you know, the important point is that the committee has a chance to look at this measure. They did not have a chance to do so. We want to make sure that they have the opportunity to fix the bill.

Hoyer offered to accept her changes and pass them right then and there on the floor. But Bachmann claimed rather than actually pass her amendment, she just, you know, wanted the committee to look at it.

End result? The Public Housing Asset Management Improvement Act got pulled from the floor, and now languishes in limbo. Without Bachmann's changes.

Does that sound like she was serious to you? Doesn't matter. A public housing bill is dead, and she's happy.

The fake FISA motion was used again on Wednesday, during consideration of H.R. 1424, the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act. Motion made to delete the text and turn it into the FISA bill, ruled non-germane, ruling appealed, appeal tabled. Then another motion to recommit was offered that actually had something to do with the bill, but the Republicans weren't ready to stand in the way of this one, so they allowed a straight-up vote on their motion, using "forthwith" instructions. They lost.

But the tricks were back on Thursday, for consideration of H.R. 2857, the GIVE Act, reauthorizing the AmeriCorps program. Only this time, they added another twist. Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) offered the fake FISA motion. Motion ruled non-germane, ruling appealed, appeal tabled. Then the "real" motion, from Rep. Randy Kuhl (R-NY), requiring criminal background checks for AmeriCorps volunteers. But using the bill-killing "promptly" language.

In a replay of the Bachmann charade, Rep. George Miller (D-CA), offered on behalf of Democrats to accept Kuhl's changes, if he'd amend his motion language from "promptly" to "forthwith," and Kuhl offered a counter-proposal: he'd change it to "forthwith" if the Dems would bring an immediate vote on the Senate FISA bill.

No deal. Dems told Kuhl to go hang, but had to pull the AmeriCorps bill, too.

You may recall that the other day, mcjoan told us that Congressional Dems may just have to run out the clock on the 110th without getting anything major done. Now it looks like House Republicans have decided to make sure even less gets accomplished, by proposing amendments to every bill through the motion to recommit, but then declining Democratic offers to accept those changes, preferring to kill entire bills and their own amendments with contrived delays.

Congratulations, then, to the Republicans, for inventing the House equivalent of the filibuster. Or at least the House "hold." Granted, in the other body, just one Senator can do this all alone. But among the House Republican Borg, there is but one collective mind. So when one pulls this delaying move, all are sure to follow, committing their votes to it just as readily and robotically as they did in their glory days as the Rubber Stamp Republicans of old.

Look for more of the same in the coming days.

A few weeks ago, I took a look back at a bit of parliamentary maneuvering that the House Republicans have been using to great effect in derailing Democratic legislation, and even pushing Republican legislation through the House, even though the 2006 elections gave Dems nominal control of the chamber. Specifically, I looked at the way Republicans were able to use the motion to recommit, or even just the threat of it, to force through the odious FISA bill passed last August.

The motion to recommit has been used by the Republicans used to drive wedges into the Democratic Caucus time and time again. That's the modern function of the motion, really. Originally, the MTR was designed to offer the minority a modicum of fairness in debate, by giving it an opportunity to propose either a refinement or even a complete alternative to whatever bill was under consideration, and get an up-or-down vote on the floor. Today, it's mostly used to engineer uncomfortable votes that the majority will have to swallow with a smile in order to get legislation passed. Most typically, it's used in ways that are substantively "meaningless" (though imbued with symbolic meaning that's destructive to Democratic unity), such as by offering a motion to amend some pending bill such that the funds in it are prohibited from use for providing services to illegal immigrants. In almost every case, either the the bill itself or existing law already prohibits such spending, but Republicans insist on a vote on it anyway. And the Democratic leadership -- chiefly, it seems, at the instruction of Steny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel -- routinely refrains from instructing Democrats in "swing" districts to avoid such entanglements with the GOP agenda, and in fact encourages them to "defuse" potential election issues by going along with such motions, since they make no substantive change in the state of the law.

But this freedom to "vote your district" has a flip side: a lack of routine Caucus discipline that rejects Republican procedural maneuvering in all cases, and dismisses out of hand these last minute manipulations. Because Democratic Members are "free" to go along with Republicans on most motions to recommit, it's hard to corral them back when you need them to resist particularly pernicious ones, as was the case with the FISA bill in August.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the same dynamic caused some intra-caucus tension late this week, through Republican use of a close cousin of the motion to recommit -- the motion to instruct conferees.

Find out just what happened, after the break.

The House was scheduled to take up the RESTORE Act today, in an effort to roll back the August FISA debacle. But as predicted last week, the bill fell victim to yet another Republican motion to recommit (see linked story for a backgrounder on the motion).

As TPM Election Central reported earlier, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced his intention to offer a motion to recommit the bill with instructions that it be amended "promptly" to include language that nothing in it:

"shall be construed to prohibit the intelligence community from conducting surveillance needed to prevent Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or any other foreign terrorist organization...from attacking the United States or any United States person."

What does that mean? A couple things.

First, it means that Cantor has devised a vote that some strategists worry will be very tough for Democrats from marginal districts to resist. How, they fret, will these Democrats be able to explain voting no on an "amendment" that supposedly ensures that intelligence operatives won't be tied up in red tape when they need to prevent a terrorist attack?

Second, it means that if enough Democrats sweat this vote and go along with Republicans, the bill gets "recommitted" -- that is, it's sent back to committee.

Third, the choice of the "promptly" language means the bill gets delayed, and can't come to the floor for passage right away. Why is that?

If you love having people stare at you like you're from another planet, read on after the flip and find out. Then you too can be the person nobody will sit next to on day two of the legislative education conference.

While there will be no shortage (I hope, probably ill-advisedly) of coverage of the substantive issues at stake in the upcoming FISA debate, there's a bit of parliamentary procedure I think you need to know about in order to be a more effective citizen lobbyist: the motion to recommit.

The motion is used exclusively in the House, and here's the short version of what it does:

A motion to recommit returns a bill to committee, in effect killing it. However, a motion to recommit with instructions is a last opportunity to amend the bill.

The instructions to the committee direct changes to the text of the bill. If adopted, the chairman of the named committee immediately stands and reports the change back to the House. The next step is the House vote on final passage of the bill.

Minority Members receive priority of recognition for offering motions to recommit.

If you're into it, here's the long version.

And if you are insane, here's the version that will make people cross the street to avoid conversation with you about it. (PDF)

As even the short version makes clear, the motion to recommit is generally the prerogative of the minority, meaning that in the current House these motions are offered by Republicans. They come at the end of debate on a bill, and are supposed to be the minority's last chance to get an up or down vote on their own version of the bill, or some key amendment that they believe belongs in it.

In practice, the Republicans have become quite skilled at using such motions to devise wedge issue votes designed to put Democrats on the spot, forcing them to go on the record over just the sorts of issues you might have thought winning majority control of the House would have "protected" Democrats from having to deal with. The condemnation of MoveOn.org, for instance, was presented in the House using a motion to recommit following consideration of the must-pass "continuing resolution" (definition), which enabled the government to continue functioning in the absence of the regular appropriations bills, the federal fiscal year having ended on September 30th.

The reason I bring this up is that the motion to recommit may be crucial to the substantive outcome of the next FISA bill coming down the pike.

I'll tell you why over the flip.

A few months back, I started to look at this, but butted up against the problem of not really knowing the rules too good.

That's a work in progress - but it did occur to me to float one way that the GOP might approach minority status in (let's suppose) both houses of the 110th.

Naturally, the ¡No pasarán! strategy is open to them: clearly, the Dems are not going to get any legislation enacted over Bush's veto; and they're unlikely to be able to defeat a properly managed filibuster.

But there are costs to being in-your-face obstructive - the do nothing tag reworked - that, no doubt, the GOP would rather avoid, if possible.

There are some who act as if torture and habeas corpus are serious matters.

Fortunately, your representatives in Congress aren't the sort of milquetoast bleeding-hearts to believe that old malarky!

The fun was most intense yesterday in the House Judiciary Committee (chaired by old man Sensenbrenner).

Working off inadequate information last night, I was so unwise as to conclude on one of Bowers' threads that passage of the administration bill HR 6054 was some kind of masterstroke by the S-Man.

Today, Milbank puts me right.

(My earlier pieces on the topic.)