GOP Prepares New House Rules
Politico reports:
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.
