Freedom Caucus Moves to Boost Power of Congress Rank and File Members

New procedural rules proposed by the House Freedom Caucus (HFC) would restore the ability of individual representatives to amend bills, return committees to the heart of law-making, and relax leadership’s choke-hold on the daily direction of the lower chamber of Congress.

“We want a participatory process. You will hear me say occasionally that we have this illusion of representative government,” HFC chairman Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) told The Epoch Times in a Sept. 30 interview.

“The people think they send their Member of Congress to Washington … and their member is involved in negotiation and amendments, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. We are voting ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on bills that we’ve never seen before the day they come to the floor, it’s wholly unacceptable,” Perry said.

The Pennsylvania Republican leads the 42-member HFC, after succeeding Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) in November 2021. The HFC was organized in 2015 with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) as its first chairman. Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was also an HFC chairman during his House tenure.

The HFC’s purpose is to “give voice to countless Americans who feel that Washington does not represent them. We support open, accountable and limited government, the Constitution and the rule of law, and policies that promote the liberty, safety and prosperity of all Americans.”

The HFC proposals could become House rules after the November mid-term elections if voters return Republicans to the majority. The newly elected GOP majority will debate and adopt new rules when the 118th Congress convenes in January 2023.

Among the proposed rules included in the HFC proposal is the repeal of the “Same Day” rule that Democrats instituted in May 2020 to get around the requirement that all bills be publicly available for at least 72 hours before being voted on by the House to ensure that all representatives can read the text before voting.

Asked if anybody in Congress would publicly oppose repealing the Same Day rule, Perry said “yes, there will be people opposing repeal but they won’t be public about it, nobody is going to go out and say ‘look, if you elect me, I’m going to make sure me and my colleagues have no time to read these bills, and we’re going to ram this stuff through so we can get things accomplished.”

The HFC proposal observes that “Speaker Pelosi has kept this extraordinary power for over two years, using it to rush the passage of massive trillion-dollar spending deals so fast that no one can even read them.”

“Under the HFC proposal, the 72-hour requirement would be increased to 120 hours and waiver would require a two-thirds vote of the full House.

“People need time to read and consider and if that means they eventually vote no, well, that’s what it means. This government was meant to be slow and cumbersome so that we don’t rush through cataclysmic changes that upend peoples’ lives like what is happening right now,” Perry told The Epoch Times.

Another HFC proposal would require that chairmen and ranking minority members of all House committees be elected by the members of those panels instead of by the chamber’s respective party leaders.

The power to determine committee leadership is a key component of the House leadership’s ability to dominate proceedings under the current rules.

The HFC proposal is meant to help restore “regular order” in the House. That is the traditional procedure in which legislative proposals are introduced, referred to a committee, hearings are held in which Congress receives testimony for and against, amendments are considered to the text, and then, if a majority of the panel votes for it, the bill goes to the full House for an up or down vote.

“People have different definitions of ‘regular order’ but I think for most of us here that includes the committee process where you might not get a hearing on a bill, but you certainly should have a mark-up and an opportunity for discussion and amendments,” Perry explained.

“We think the committee process is nearly as important as everything else but it’s not enough just to have it run through the committee process … we also want more active involvement in committee leadership and committee direction,” he said.

In an effort to restore the authority of Congress to shape the federal budget, the HFC proposals include a requirement that Congress debate and vote on all 12 major appropriations bills no later than Aug. 1. If those measures aren’t completed by Sept. 10, then the Speaker would be prohibited from recessing or adjourning the House until the House has completed the required action.

The HFC proposals would also restore a traditional measure known as the “Holman Rule” which enables the House to enact targeted spending cuts in particular programs and to eliminate positions in the federal bureaucracy.

Democrats abolished the Holman Rule in 2019 when they retook the House majority.

Reminded that the Republican majority that preceded the Democratic takeover never used the Holman Rule, Perry said there was reticence among GOP House members to employ it except under extraordinary circumstances.

“But based on what we have seen in the last two years now with an executive branch that is out of control, that is abusing its authority … let’s face it, we can’t squander these coming two years, the American experiment doesn’t have any more time to waste and we need to use every single tool at our disposal judiciously,” he explained.

Other HFC rule changes include abolishing earmarks—recently restored with support from majorities of both parties—because the practice “enables party leaders to coerce members into supporting legislation they otherwise would oppose. Earmarks facilitate federal overreach by spending taxpayer-dollars on personal pet projects of lawmakers and lobbyists,” according to the proposal.

Asked why the rules proposals do not mention limits on how much time House leaders can require individual members to make “dialing for dollars” fund-raising calls, Perry would only say “we are putting some of our cards on the table to start the discussion. These are not all of our cards.”