Tell your Senators - Repeal the Filibuster, PayGo and the Budget Control Act

Senator Dianne Feinstein

SF Office: (415) 393-0707
DC Office: (202) 224-3841
LA Office: (310) 914-7300
Fresno Office: (559) 485-7430
San Diego Office: (619) 231-9712

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Senator Kamala Harris

SF Office: (415) 981-9369
DC Office: (202) 224-3553
Sacramento Office: (916) 448-2787
LA Office: (213) 894-5000
San Diego Office: (619) 239-3884

Call the SF office first, but try the other offices if you can’t get through. If you can’t get a live person, leave a voicemail and also send a follow-up email written in your own words. Hate the phone? Resistbot is your friend.

Call Script

My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.

America faces enormous inter-related health, climate, and economic crises, all of which require bold and effective legislative action. New emergency programs must be swiftly enacted and the necessary funds appropriated. This requires changing Senate rules that have been used in the past to block essential measures essential for our health, safety, and the future welfare of our children. As my senator, I urge you to:

Eliminate the Senate filibuster rule.
Eliminate the Senate PayGo rule.

And as soon as feasible, I urge you to repeal the Budget Control Act.

Background

Republicans and some conservative Democrats seem to believe that government should be limited to national defense, police power, and corporate subsidies & welfare. But the great majority of voters want government to take an active role in matters of healthcare, environment, racial and economic justice, education, and so much else. Knowing that their positions are deeply unpopular, conservatives rig the rules so that behind the scenes they can use parliamentary procedure to kill progressive legislation, pleasing their corporate donors while deceiving their constituents.

Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) Rules

In the 1990s, conservatives forced both the House and the Senate to adopt PayGo rules. Under PayGo, if a new law or a new program required new federal spending, the bill had to cut an equal amount from some other designated government program. The goal of PayGo was to fix into law the Republian dogma of preventing the total size of federal discretionary-spending from ever rising at all.

But built into the PayGo rules are exceptions and escape clauses that conservatives use to allow increases in areas that they favor such as Defense, police, and Homeland Security. Since “Defense” funding has been made sacrosanct and exempt from PayGo, in real life only domestic social spending is subject to PayGo caps – as Republicans intended. PayGo means that new social programs can only be funded by cutting existing programs.

So, for example, if a bill is introduced to increase subsidies for solar power or housing for the homeless, it must include cuts to programs like child-nutrition or public health. This pits progressive advocates against each other. If Covid-related health initiatives and pandemic economic relief programs are subjected to PayGo rules, desperately needed programs to feed the hungry, house the poor, care for the vulnerable, protect the environment and so on will all have their funding slashed.

On a larger scale, for generations more than half of the federal budget has been spent on “national security” (meaning Defense Department, nuclear weapons, spies, debt from past wars, and so on). At some point in the future we need to challenge the assumption that war and the military are more important than the health, welfare, and economic-security of the American people. We need to challenge the narrow assumption by conservatives that threats to our “national security” come entirely and only from foreign militaries and terrorists. The most urgent national security threats we face today are from global climate change, the pandemic, the criminal under-funding of our education system, the offshoring of manufacturing & research, and so on. The first step towards addressing this issue is to eliminate the PayGo shackles.

Motion to Recommit (MTR)

The House rules governing how bills are enacted into law specify a long, complicated, and arduous process with committee hearings, debate & voting rules, floor debate, amendments, three readings of the bill, engrossment, and so on. At the very end of the process, just before the final vote to pass or reject a bill, the Motion to Recommit Rule (MTR) allows the minority party (Republicans currently) to derail passage with surprise maneuvers. MTR comes in two flavors:

With Instructions: A MTR with instructions allows the minority party to, in essence, propose a last-minute, never-before-debated or studied, surprise amendment to what was supposed to be the final bill. Debate on a MTR is limited to a total of 10 minutes (5 minutes for each side) so the surprise amendment is a political ambush. MTR amendments can be political “poison pills” designed to peel away enough previous supporters so that they then oppose the legislation they were previously in favor of. For example, tacking on an anti-immigrant expansion of ICE power to a bill intended to close the gun show background-check loophole.

Without Instructions: A MTR without instructions sends the bill back to committee. That starts the arduous legislative process all over again from square-one. In effect, this almost always kills the bill. Republicans use this gimmick to force Democrats to vote for or against extraneous issues that have nothing to do with the bill under consideration. Votes that later can be used as the basis for deceptive political attack ads (“voted against/for ….”). MTRs without instructions also enable deceit on the part of MoC whose constituents favor a bill that big-donors oppose. Secure in the knowledge that voters pay no attention to process while paid corporate lobbyists watch process like hawks, a manipulative MoC can urge passage of the bill in floor debate (recorded in the Congressional Record for constituents to be shown) but then sabotage the bill by voting for a MTR that kills it.

Congressional Power

Congress is supposed to be a co-equal branch of government charged with oversight of the Executive Branch. But the Trump administration repudiated and ignored congressional subpoenas, refused to provide documents as legally required to do, and stonewalled oversight efforts by the House. They did so with utter impunity.

The House failed to enforce their power and prerogatives, allowing Trump and the Republican Party to make a mockery of oversight. In large part, this failure represented a failure of will and courage on the part of Democratic Party leadership who chose not to exercise powers such as Inherent Contempt that Congress has wielded in the past. But to the degree that oversight powers need clarification and strengthening, the House should adopt rules and enact legislation allowing a chamber of Congress on its own to enforce subpoenas and sanction contempt of Congress with significant monetary penalties – without relying on the Department of Justice to prosecute court cases on their behalf.

References

Congressional Democrats Can Change The Rules ~ Indivisible

House Rules That Need Changing ~ Indivisible

Unrig the Rules Explainer ~ Congressional Progressive Caucus

PayGo Rule

The Senate Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) Rule ~ Congressional Research Service

The Flawed Economics of the PAYGO Rule ~ Roosevelt Institute

Motion to Recommit (MTR)

LEGISLATIVE PROCESS 101—MOTION TO RECOMMIT ~ Indivisible

THE MOTION TO RECOMMIT ~ House Majority Office

Motions to Recommit: A brief history and reform options ~ LegBranch.Org

Congressional Powers