Last night the US government barely avoided breaching the US debt ceiling, which would have left the US Treasury unable to pay their bills within the next few days. This could have been disastrous for the recovering global economy and devalued the dollar drastically. But now that the danger has been momentarily averted (until January at least), perhaps it’s time to reflect on the failures of the US democratic system this crisis has made evident. While there are many things to be said for the sheer amount of gridlock and hate the two party system creates, or how a gerrymandered majority party (a minority by popular vote) claiming to speak for an (invisible) majority was willing and almost able to send their entire country over a “fiscal cliff” over healthcare reform, instead let’s focus on some parliamentary procedure.
Parliamentary procedure is one of the things that most people don’t understand about their own government, let alone for international governments. In the US, the rules for the Senate and House of Representatives are thousands of pages long, with many obscure ideas and guidelines.
On Monday, a representative in the House tried to invoke one of these rules, in clause 4 of House Rule XXII. This clause says that “When the stage of disagreement has been reached on a bill or resolution with House or Senate amendments, a motion to dispose of any amendment shall be privileged.” Simply, that means that any member of the legislature can make a motion to drop the proposed amendments and continue to vote on the original bill. Because this would have removed the modifications the right wing made to the original appropriations bill and put a clean bill up to vote, they decided to limit it completely. House Resolution 368 changed clause 4 of Rule XXII, and especially applied itself to House Joint Resolution 59 (the appropriations bill which was being fought over).
In case you missed that, the House Republicans made it so that only Eric Cantor (the republican majority leader) or someone he designated could initiate a vote on the appropriations bill, House Joint Resolution 59. It’s even confusing to try and explain, but essentially the House Republicans managed to limit democracy so that the entire United States’ fiscal solvency rested on the opinion of one representative of a minority party.
Somehow the “most democratic country on Earth” was no longer a republic for three days. Somehow, this makes other styles of democracy look more and more appealing.
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