House sends mixed signals on its seriousness and self-worth 

I recently wrote on that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a 40-year-old precedent known as the Chevron doctrine. Under the Chevron doctrine, the courts were advised to defer to executive branch agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous provisions in statutes. The court ruled that was its exclusive role.  

I suggested the court’s opinion should be a wakeup call for Congress to be more conscientious and precise in its enactments to avoid either the executive or judicial branches usurping its lawmaking functions.   

That same week, on three consecutive days (July 9-11), the House flexed its anti-over-regulatory chops by passing three measures disapproving executive agency regulations ranging from women’s rights to home appliance energy standards.  

Then, on the final day, the House turned around and voted 205-213 to defeat its own funding bill for fiscal 2025, the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act. Ten Republicans and all but three Democrats voted against the measure. To say the House was sending mixed signals as to its self-worth as an institution would be an understatement, though the 15 members who did not vote might have produced a different result. Some leaders are still puzzling over why the House would bite the hand that feeds it — which is to say, its own hand.   

The House passed the gender-related disapproval resolution, “Providing for congressional disapproval… of the rule submitted by the Department of Education relating to non-discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs or activities receiving federal financial assistance.”   

The administration’s new rule had been filed by the Department of Education in April. The disapproval resolution was reported out of the House Education and the Workforce Committee along party lines on June 25 under the terms of the Congressional Review Act. The House had passed a nearly identical measure last year, the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, without utilizing the Congressional Review Act.

Congress enacted the Congressional Review Act as an oversight tool that requires agencies to submit their proposed rules and regulations to Congress for a 60-day review period. If either house of Congress introduces a joint resolution of disapproval within that time frame, and it passes both chambers and is signed by the president (or enacted over a veto), the rule may not go into effect or continue in effect.   

According to a Congressional Research Service brief (updated Feb. 27, 2023), the Congressional review Act has been used to successfully overturn 20 rules: one in the 107th Congress (2001-02), 16 in the 115th Congress (2017-18), and three in the 117th Congress (2021-22).  

An attempt to disapprove a Securities and Exchange Commission rule using this process failed on July 11, when the House came up 40 votes short of the two-thirds needed to override President Biden’s veto.  

The House Education Committee’s majority report on the Title IX regulation asserts that the rule is “unlawful in multiple ways,” and that it “strips students, educators and parents of their legal rights” because it imposes the “radical left’s view of gender.”

The committee minority report argues that the disapproval resolution is “driven primarily by the desire to deny the existence of transgender youth,” and is part of the House majority’s “campaign of culture war legislation,” targeting “a vulnerable class of students.” The House passed the joint resolution on July 11 on a straight party-line vote of 210-205.  

The two disapproval measures for home appliance energy conservation standards were not presented under the terms of the Congressional Review Act’s processes, but rather as straight bills. The Refrigerator Freedom Act and the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards Act were both reported by the House Energy and Commerce Committee and justified on grounds that “the standards are not cost-effective or technologically feasible” as required by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975. Both bills passed the House on near-party-line votes July 9.  

The partisan votes on all three regulation disapproval measures and the legislative branch appropriations bill are telling. The two parties obviously differ on many policy issues these days, and that is reflected in the marked increase in strictly partisan votes. It is also understandable that a House Republican majority will push back on regulations promulgated by a Democratic administration.   

The fact remains, though, that in a Congress with split party control of the two chambers, and with a Democratic president to boot, the exercises we witnessed last week were little more than partisan messaging, doomed ultimately to fail.

Until Congress gets serious about strengthening the resources of its committees and support agencies so that it can resume bipartisan deliberations and legislating, finding common ground will be impossible. Last week was a zero-sum game, only spitting-out campaign fodder that doesn’t do a thing about solving the country’s problems.  

Don Wolfensberger is a 28-year congressional staff veteran and former chief-of-staff of the House Rules Committee.  He is author of “Congress and the People: Deliberative Democracy on Trial” (2000), and, “Changing Cultures in Congress: From Fair Play to Power Plays” (2018).