In a funny current television ad for a vacation rental company, former University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban portrays a grumpy, micromanaging homeowner who makes life miserable for a family of renters by dictating a long list of oppressive, bootcamp-like rules that will govern their stay. Among the dictates: limits on shower lengths and toilet flushes and no games, no fun, and no kids in the house.
The ad and its amusing absurdity probably came to mind for anyone who had seen it as they watched last week’s action in the North Carolina House of Representatives.
Everyone knows that legislative bodies must operate under a set of parliamentary rules and procedures. After all, maintaining order in a large group of opinionated and talkative politicians is no easy feat, and without rules governing things like how committees will operate, who can speak and when, and which motions will be considered and in what order, the potential for chaotic disorder is high.
Former University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban is now a TV pitchman for various corporations. (Photo: Univ. of Alabama)That said, when the rules become Saban-like – that is, so numerous, complex and restrictive that they make majority rule effectively impossible — they’ve gone too far and, as is explained below, that’s the case right now in the North Carolina House of Representatives.
What is a rule?
Interestingly, the idea of what constitutes a “rule,” when it will apply, and how it will be enacted and enforced is somewhat flexible and has evolved down through the decades.
In the U.S House of Representatives, there are rules that govern the basics of House operations, but there are also “special rules” that govern the consideration of individual bills and resolutions that are the province of the powerful Rules Committee.
Thus, while a bill can go directly to a floor vote after being approved by a substantive committee like, say, Education and Workforce, the common practice is for the Rules Committee to serve as the next step in the process. Operating as a gatekeeper, it will decide whether to issue a special “rule” that determines things like when the bill will be heard and how much time will be allotted for debate.
Across the nation, many state legislatures have their own versions of this set-up. In North Carolina, both the Senate and House have Rules Committees that have come to resemble the U.S. House version in recent years. While neither go to the trouble of issuing special “rules” to govern a bill’s consideration, in practice, both do act as gatekeepers, appendages of leadership, and the final arbiters of whether a bill will make it to the floor.
NC GOP lawmakers add more rules
With such an arrangement, you’d think Republican legislative leaders would feel secure in their ability to exert complete control over all details of the legislative process. As was made plain last week, however, as state House leaders rolled out their new state budget proposal in a series of appropriations subcommittee meetings and, at least in theory, opened it up to debate and amendment, that’s not the case.
As it turns out, the lengthy and detailed provisions of the existing House Rules – all of which were written and enacted by the GOP majority – were deemed insufficient. Instead, appropriations subcommittee chairs all commenced their meetings last week by unveiling yet another long list of new, additional and restrictive rules handed down from some unknown place that made the consideration of meaningful amendments all but impossible.
Somewhere, the Nick Saban commercial character was smiling.
Among the prohibitions:
no amendments to spend additional dollars were allowed unless they reduced another line item from a very restricted list by the same amount, no amendments to increase overall spending, no amendments that include Hurricane Helene related items, no amendment dealing with fees, no amendments to reduce or eliminate vacant positions (or the associated savings in salary and benefits).What’s more all of these prohibitions were sprung on Democratic lawmakers as they entered the room and saw hundreds of pages of proposed law changes and spending items for the first time. They were allotted an hour or two to draft amendments.
Talk about no fun and no kids in the house.
Politics and appearances
Of course, as with so many restrictive legislative rules, the purpose of the new prohibitions has more to do with politics and appearances than dictating outcomes. Republicans have the votes to do whatever they want when it comes to passing legislation; what they designed the new rules to help them avoid was the possibility that they might have to go on the record in doing so.
Better to rule an amendment “out of order” pursuant to a restrictive rule, goes the thinking, than to risk casting a public “no” vote on something popular and logical like, say, a Democratic proposal to strengthen schools, help businesses devastated by Helene, or cancel a planned $2 million expenditure for moving the State Board of Elections into the building that houses its new overseer, state Auditor Dave Boliek.
The bottom line: In representative government, the majority is supposed to rule. In the North Carolina House a list of anti-democratic restrictions helps make sure that’s regularly not the case.
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