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| The new House Republican majority will force lawmakers to vote when they want to raise the nation's debt ceiling, publish committee attendance records, keep former members from lobbying in the House gym and require new mandatory spending to be offset by cuts to other programs. Those planned changes to rules in the House and elsewhere, scheduled to be adopted Jan. 5, are described in a summary that was provided by House Republicans early Wednesday morning. The actual text of the rules package, which still could be amended by the full Republican Conference on Jan. 4, was not yet available. House Republicans will even provide for a reading of the Constitution in the House chamber on the second day of the next Congress. House Republicans have left untouched rules governing the controversial Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent watchdog agency that has the power to investigate lawmakers and refer cases to the internal House ethics committee. Taken together, the rules changes appear aimed at addressing complaints that the legislative process isn't transparent enough, that Congress is rigged to overspend and that lawmakers ignore the Constitution when formulating policy. "These reforms represent Republicans' first step in keeping the promises we outlined in the Pledge to America to change the way Washington works and address the people’s priorities: creating jobs and cutting spending,” Speaker-designate John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement issued with the summary. Many of the new rules focus on the operations of committees. One that promises to cause consternation among lawmakers — and fodder for challengers on the campaign trail — is a requirement that committees publish online records of who did and didn't show up for committee meetings. In addition, chairmen will be required to circulate the text of bills at least 24 hours before they are considered, post the text of amendments and vote results online, publish "truth in testimony" statements, so that potential conflicts of interest for witnesses are known, and give three days of notice before a markup. Some of the committee rules — and at least one for the full House — address concerns that legislators don't spend enough time reading bills and members of the public have trouble accessing them. "[I]t shall not be in order to consider a bill or joint resolution which has not been reported by a committee until the third calendar day … on which such measure has been publicly available in electronic form,” reads one new rule. It's not clear, however, that the rules changes will require that Rules Committee alterations to major bills be posted online three days in advance of consideration on the floor. That would leave GOP leaders a significant exemption to make last-minute changes without such a long period of public scrutiny. But the GOP will make standard printing bills in electronic form. On the spending front, Republicans plan to implement a series of rules called CUT/GO — a conservative answer to the PAY/GO rules instituted by Democrats. Under CUT/GO, increases in mandatory spending would have to be offset by spending cuts in other programs. Mandatory spending refers to the autopilot portion of the budget covering Social Security, Medicare and other programs designed to make payouts based on eligibility criteria rather than a set dollar figure each year. Under CUT/GO, offsets could not be achieved by raising taxes, according to the summary. In addition, GOP leaders will eliminate the so-called Gephardt Rule, which has long allowed House members to avoid a direct vote on raising the nation's debt ceiling. The rule provided that a bill increasing the debt limit was automatically generated when the House adopted a conference report on the annual budget resolution. Republicans will continue a Democratic policy forbidding former lawmakers who register as lobbyists from using to the House gym. Republicans will also restore House rules limiting chairmen to three two-year terms and prohibiting delegates and resident commissioners from voting on amendments on the floor. The GOP is renaming restoring the Education and Labor Committee to the Education and Workforce Committee, renaming the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct the Committee on Ethics and the Committee on Science and Technology will now be called the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. | |
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