House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern have surrendered on two more fronts to the Democrat Party’s “progressives.”
House rules in the 117th Congress ban the use of “gender-exclusive” terms such as mother and father, and also exclude Medicare-for-All and the Green New Deal from “paygo” rules that would block them by requiring a means to pay for them.
The new rules also block motions that require recorded votes on matters that make leftist Democrats appear as ridiculous as they really are.
The new rules passed yesterday by a 217-206 party-line vote.
No Mothers and Fathers
The rules-change on “gender,” Pelosi and McGovern said, “promotes inclusion and diversity” by “honor[ing] all gender identities by changing pronouns and familial relationships in the House rules to be gender neutral.”
The codicil is unsurprising. Democrats surrendered to science-denier leftists on the “gender” issue some time ago, and now bellow support for such crazy ideas as allowing grown men to crossdress and join little girls in the ladies’ restroom.
Thus, the bad old days when legislation used such terms as mother and father, or brother or sister, are gone.
“Seafarers” will replace “seamen,” the bill says, while terms that describe family relations are erased.
“Father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, first cousin, nephew, niece, husband, wife, father-in-law, mother-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, stepfather, stepmother, stepson, stepdaughter, stepbrother, step sister, half brother, half sister, grandson, or granddaughter” will be replaced with these terms:
parent, child, sibling, parent’s sibling, first cousin, sibling’s child, spouse, parent-in-law, child-in-law, sibling-in-law, stepparent, stepchild, stepsibling, half-sibling, or grandchild.
Himself and herself will become the nonsensical “themself.” The Office of the Whistleblower Ombudsman will become the equally nonsensical Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds.
House Rules PDF Pages 5 6In keeping with the soon-to-be-taken vote on gender rules, Representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri ended his opening prayer with “amen and awoman.”
The homosexual and crossdressing lobby is giddy about those changes, of course, but perhaps not as happy as “progressives” are about another change. The new rules eliminate what remained of the worn-down brakes on fiscal responsibility, the pay-as-you-go stipulation for legislation.
Pelosi herself pushed that provision into the rules for the last Congress to hamstring the crazier ideas of the hard Left. It required all new spending to be paid for with corresponding budget cuts or tax increases.
Now, it’s gone at the behest of the progressives who want to ram through Medicare-for-All and the beyond-absurd New Green Deal.
House Rules Page 33Tweeted leftist Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, “So grateful to Chairman @RepMcGovern for helping us secure these reforms and setting the stage for us to push for bolder agenda.”
“Bolder agenda” is code for outright socialism.
No Motions To Recommit
Also gone is the GOP’s ability to force tough votes on controversial measures with motions to recommit.
Those motions were the right of the minority, and one last chance to kill or change a bill with an amendment. But they are largely symbolic, and permit the minority to demand votes that might embarrass a majority member in his home district.
For instance, last session, as Politico explained, when Democrats pushed a failed bill to require background checks for private-party gun transfers, “Republicans offered a motion … [that] required the notification of Immigration and Customs Enforcement if a background check revealed an illegal immigrant had attempted to purchase a firearm.”
“It proved to be a savvy move,” the website continued:
By weaving a hot button immigration topic into the bill, Republicans managed to sway 26 Democratic members, predominantly from more competitive swing districts, to buck Democratic party leadership and vote for the motion.
With the change, a congressman can no longer amend a bill on the floor. Instead, the motion to recommit will send a bill back to committee. That will kill the motion, and means the GOP can no longer force the Democrats to make a tough vote that might mean trouble with the folks back home.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California called the move an attack on free speech.
“These changes will stop Americans’ voices from being heard — primarily by revoking the motion to recommit, the minority’s longtime right to offer the last amendment to legislation,” he said. “For our constituents, taking it away means freedom of speech is silenced and good ideas are stifled.”
McCarthy rightly called the “gender”-language nonsense “stupid.”
