The House of Representatives, an institution whose stated purpose is to pass legislation, gathered this week and passed a resolution to stop passing legislation. This is known, in the technical vocabulary of American governance, as a procedure. The procedure failed. The House then adjourned. You will be relieved to know the procedure worked perfectly.
Here is what happened, rendered without mercy: House Republican leadership brought a special rule to the floor — a parliamentary device designed to bundle four significant measures into a single passable vehicle. The majority voted against their own vehicle. Leadership watched the majority defeat the majority's plan. The week was then declared over. Nobody had to drive home angry, because nobody had gone anywhere.
A special rule, for the uninitiated, is a mechanism by which the House tells itself what it is allowed to do next. The House, having been told, declined. This raises a question that parliamentary procedure has historically been reluctant to answer: what do you call a majority that cannot outvote itself? The traditional answer is “the minority,” but in this case the minority had nothing to do with it, which makes the majority something rarer — a self-contained opposition party, doing the blocking and the being-blocked simultaneously, like a revolving door that has voted to stop revolving.
Leadership, to their credit, remained optimistic. They are always optimistic. Optimism in a legislative body is the belief that next week the votes will be there, because last week the votes were not there, and surely the universe alternates. The members who killed the rule had concerns. The concerns were serious. The concerns will be addressed. The House will return. The procedure will be different. The math, one assumes, will remain the same math.
I have always admired a body that can adjourn having accomplished nothing, because it takes real discipline to resist the temptation of accidentally passing something on your way out. These members held the line. They came, they convened, they counted, and they found the count wanting — and rather than do the embarrassing work of changing the count, they went home and left the count exactly as it was, a monument to the week, undisturbed.
The measures remain unpasssed. The rule remains defeated. The majority remains in charge. The only thing that actually got through the House this week was Thursday.