House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn and Speaker Nancy Pelosi have stepped up their outreach to the rank-and-file in hopes of heading off another embarrassment on the floor. | Zach Gibson/Getty Images Congress House Dems mount campaign to stem defections on GOP 'gotcha' votes Democrats privately say that leadership shares the blame for the aggravation over the GOP's procedural wins.

House Democratic leaders are working to fend off changes to decades-old floor rules amid mounting pressure to act from the party’s most vulnerable freshmen.

Through one-on-one appeals, in closed-door meetings and with even a little arm twisting, top Democrats are privately trying to contain defectors within their ranks who want to take the sting out of a procedural tool that has been weaponized by Republicans.


But if that diplomacy campaign fails, some rank-and-file Democrats want to see drastic changes — including possibly even eliminating the procedure altogether.

Doing so would be an embarrassment for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her top deputies, who would come under fresh attacks from GOP leaders for re-writing the rules after they successfully lured dozens of Democrats to buck their own party on what leadership describes as "gotcha" votes.

“Managing this issue is going to be a little more difficult when you’ve got all these diversities, backgrounds and experiences,” said House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina. “We’ll never put that behind us because the other side has a job to do, and part of their job is to make life difficult for us.”

Democratic leaders were alarmed two weeks ago when more than two dozen of their members broke ranks and voted for a GOP amendment — known formally as a motion to recommit — to add immigration-related language to their universal background checks bill. The motion to recommit provides the Republicansa chance to influence legislation in the minority and is rarely successful.

Sign up here for POLITICO Huddle A daily play-by-play of congressional news in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

The GOP’s procedural win overshadowed what was supposed to be a major moment for House Democrats — passage of the first major gun control legislation in decades.

After that, Pelosi, Clyburn and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland stepped up their outreach to the rank and file in hopes of heading off another embarrassment on the floor. Pelosi scolded moderates in a closed-door meeting — leaving some of them furious — for voting with Republicans and since then has taken a multifacted approach to try to privately address the issue.

The divide among Democrats on the gun control bill infuriated other veteran lawmakers, prompting leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus to warn freshman moderates to stay in line or risk derailing the party’s broader agenda.

“I said, ‘Look, here’s where we are, I am not going to be able to hold my caucus together,” CPC co-chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said, explaining her conversations with several new members. “If you do this, we will lose a lot of members on the final bill, and it will go down.”

But Democrats privately say that leadership shares the blame for the heartburn on the floor since Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn have differing opinions on which of their members, if any, should be allowed to vote with Republicans on the procedural motion.



Democratic lawmakers in GOP-leaning districts have complained they’re hearing vastly different messages from the top three leaders on how to vote, compounding the confusion in the few minutes lawmakers have on the House floor from the time the GOP amendment is unveiled to the time they have to vote on it.

It’s also heightened tension between freshmen in battleground districts and veteran lawmakers who feel Democratic leaders have been too lenient with new members who break ranks.

After the surprising blow on the background check bill, Hoyer personally called each of the half-dozen Democratic veterans who voted with the GOP, arguing that they all needed to protect the freshmen. But those members have argued that they, too, have to battle for their seats in the next cycle.

Publicly, the controversy has cooled. Democrats also appear to be more cognizant of the GOP’s tactic and only lost a handful of members on the last motion to recommit that Republicans offered — an amendment to reaffirm that illegal immigrants aren’t allowed to vote.

But the topic has come up repeatedly recently in closed-door meetings as Democratic leaders try to head off another defeat.

“You did not win because of an MTR,” Pelosi said in a private meeting Wednesday with some freshmen, trying to encourage freshmen who said they were worried they could lose their seats because of their vote. “You won because people believed in you,” she added, according to a source in the room.

Freshman lawmakers raised the issue again during a whip meeting on Thursday. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell of Florida stood at one point to express concerns over members in safer districts who voted with Republicans. She said they ultimately put pressure on her and others in GOP-leaning seats who have stuck with leadership, thereby opening up vulnerable lawmakers to potential campaign attacks.

Pelosi once again responded that freshmen need to be team players and wondered aloud why some veteran lawmakers who recently won coveted spots on exclusive committees were voting with Republicans.

A growing number of Democrats, including some senior members, have said the best solution is changing the rules to allow lawmakers more than five minutes to digest the GOP’s amendment. But others say that having more time before the vote would simply open them up to attacks from outside conservative groups.

Fourteen freshmen recently sent a letter to Democratic leadership, urging them to “fix the MTR” by giving members more time to review the votes.

“Some of the explanations I’ve gotten ... ‘Well it’s 100 years old, so we can’t fix it,’ or ‘We don’t need to change it.’ That’s not a good answer for why we should keep something around,” said Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), who helped write the letter with Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.).

And on the floor, Democrats have stepped up their own defenses to defeat the GOP maneuvers.

Clyburn’s office has begun lining up lawmakers to give impassioned speeches to oppose the GOP motions and to help persuade their own rank and file to stick with Democrats.

On a recent gun control bill, for example, Clyburn’s team instructed Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) to be prepared on the floor in case Republicans tried to target them on domestic violence. Republicans did, and Dingell was ready with an emotional speech about her father's physical abuse of her mother in her childhood.

All but two Democrats — Reps. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Collin Peterson of Minnesota — ultimately stuck with the party.

Democratic staffers have been poring over Republican speeches and statements to try to anticipate the GOP’s next point of attack. They’ve also made sure that lawmakers have a copy of the text available on their phones as soon as possible on the floor. Committee staff have also been told to stay on the floor to take questions.

The angst has been growing for months, but took on new urgency after Democrats suffered two defeats on the floor. One of those losses — on a bill to pull the U.S. out of Yemen’s civil war — stripped the bill of special privileges in the Senate, requiring a do-over.

Some Democrats say their caucus must have a strategy in place before that Yemen bill comes up again later this month, though there’s no consensus about what it would be.

“I have heard from some people who say, let’s get rid of them, or let’s just, all hands on deck,” said Rep. Haley Stevens of Michigan, who is co-president of the Democratic freshman class. “What do you expect us all to sing from the same hymnal? We’re not choir children.”