House Republicans held a secret vote Monday night approving a proposal by House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) that seeks to cripple the Office of Congressional Ethics. You might have heard about it already. It’s been all over the news.
You may not have heard, however, that a significant minority of the GOP caucus voted against the proposal. Seventy-four of them, as a matter of fact, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI). In total, just 119 members of the 435 member House voted in favor of this proposal at the GOP caucus meeting. That’s only slightly more than 27 percent of the House.
Regardless, Goodlatte’s proposal is likely to be approved.
This proposal to turn an independent watchdog agency into a secretive institution subservient to the House majority could go through, despite the fact that it has fairly little support among lawmakers, because the House frequently functions as a legislative cartel.
In such a cartel, a bloc of lawmakers constituting a majority of a legislative body agree to cast their votes together, even if a minority of the bloc’s members disagree with a particular vote. Thus, under a cartel, Republicans who want to keep the ethics agency intact will still vote for the proposal because they lost the cartel’s internal vote.
This cartel-like behavior was likely also responsible for the 2013 government shutdown. A large enough minority of the GOP caucus opposed that shutdown that it could have been ended much sooner — or potentially even prevented altogether — if those Republican lawmakers joined with Democrats to fund the government. Yet then-Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) maintained the cartel by enforcing the so-called Hastert Rule, a practice named after former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) that prevents bills from coming to the floor unless a majority of the GOP caucus supports that bill.
In fairness, there are some circumstances where cartel-like behavior is appropriate, such as the election of a House speaker. Electing a speaker requires an absolute majority of the entire House. So if the majority party did not band together behind a single leader, the House could find itself without a presiding officer and severely hobbled in its ability to function.
Once this administrative task is completed, however, additional cartel-like behavior by the majority party can effectively thwart the will of the voters by placing a minority of the House in charge of lawmaking.
Indeed, as Congress expert Sarah Binder notes on Twitter, the biennial vote on a House rules package is an especially crucial vote because it allows the majority party to claim control of the legislative agenda:
yes, it's embedded in the broader rules package. This is the *key* "cartel" vote–>confers agenda control on majority (party).
— Sarah Binder (@bindersab) January 3, 2017
The House still needs to vote on its rules package for the 115th Congress, so it is possible that the cartel will break and enough Republicans will vote “no” on Goodlatte’s proposal to stop it. If the cartel holds together on this widely criticized vote, however, we can expect much more cartel-like behavior from the new House majority in the future.