The New House of Representatives
With the 118th Congress officially sworn in, the new House GOP majority’s ambitious agenda has been unfolding at a rapid pace. The first action item was to vote in a sweeping set of rules changes by which the House will limit its own powers and carry out its agenda while remaining responsive to the people. Included in the rules changes are many overdue reforms, including requiring a 72-hour period for reading bills, replacing the practice of gargantuan omnibus spending bills with 12 discrete pieces of legislation for covering the required spending, and a restoration of the old rule — jettisoned by Democrats in 2019 — permitting any member of the majority party of the House to propose a “motion to vacate” the speaker’s chair, which would trigger a full House vote on whether or not to retain the speaker. (The threat of this motion was used by the GOP in 2015 to force the ouster of unpopular RINO Speaker John Boehner.)
Additional alterations entailed by the rules changes include House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s pledge to give three out of the total nine GOP seats on the Rules Committee to Freedom Caucus members, as well as the scheduling of a vote to establish a special new subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee with the mandate to investigate misuse of power by the executive branch, including abuses perpetrated by the FBI and the DOJ against political opponents. This committee, long overdue, would be a necessary corrective to the executive abuse of investigative and prosecutory power for political motives that has become routine since 9/11. Before that infamous date, it was generally understood that the FBI and CIA were not to surveil and harass American citizens, thanks in no small measure to the work of the Senate’s “Church Committee” of the 1970s. Even then, the Church Committee failed to prove the extensive connections between the CIA and the American media, and in general fell far short of truly exposing the Deep State as then constituted.
The new House committee appears to have a much broader writ of authority, although we can certainly expect Deep Staters in the DOJ, the FBI, and the Biden administration to continue the long tradition of stonewalling, intimidation, and coverup. As for the Judiciary Committee itself, its new chair is Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, one of the staunchest constitutionalists and most outspoken members of the House Freedom Caucus.
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