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He House of Representatives has adopted new rules that would make it more difficult to provoke a vote to impeach a president.
House lawmakers voted 215-209 along party lines to set the chamber’s rules for the 119th Congress.
Among them was a measure to raise the threshold for calling a “motion to vacate the presidency,” triggering a House-wide vote to remove the sitting president.
Former President Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., agreed to lower the threshold to just one person to win over holdouts and take the presidential gavel in January 2023, at the start of the 118th Congress.
But the 119th Congress is now raising that number from one to nine, and further modifying the rule to specify that nine members of the majority party in power must be the ones to call a vote.
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Speaker Mike Johnson led the House to make it harder to remove him from the top job. (Getty)
It sparked fury among Democrats, who accused Republicans of eroding the importance of the minority party.
“The proposed changes, for the first time in American history, would shield the president from accountability to the entire House by making it so that only Republicans can act to overthrow the president,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., the The top Democrat on the House Rules Committee.
“This makes it clear that they have no intention of working together to find common ground. Instead of electing a speaker of the House, they have decided to elect a chairman of the Republican Conference, held hostage by its most extremist members.”
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Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted after agreeing to lower the threshold for a motion to vacate the presidency. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
McCarthy was notably ousted by eight House Republicans and all House Democrats after former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., called for a motion to vacate the presidency in October 2023.
The one-vote threshold hung over Johnson like the sword of Damocles for more than a year after he won the speaker’s gavel that same month.
The change is the product of negotiations between the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus and the more pragmatic Republican Main Street Caucus.
Other changes in the new House Republican rules package include replacing some genderless family language, such as “child” and “father,” with more gendered language such as son, daughter, mother and father.
Former Rep. Matt Gaetz led McCarthy’s impeachment (AP/J. Scott Applewhite)
It also limits the The capacity of the president of the House to bypass traditional House processes to rush a bill to the House floor through a mechanism known as “suspension of the rules.”
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Johnson’s use of the suspension measure to pass critical legislation with Democratic support angered GOP hardliners in the House Republican Conference.
Under the new package, Johnson will only be able to vote on a suspended House bill on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
