Jeffries Promises Punishment for Two House Democrats Who Joined With Republicans To Open the House Floor

The House’s top three Democrats are promising a “serious response” to the actions of two of their Democratic colleagues who voted with Republicans for a procedural motion to open the chamber floor for the week. The leaders say it represents a “significant breach of trust.”On Tuesday, Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republican leadership put what is known as a “rule” on the floor. In order for the House to consider legislation, the chamber must first adopt a rule, which governs debate and amendment processes for certain bills. Democrats never vote for the Republicans’ rules because those rules always restrict the minority’s ability to amend legislation. That changed on Tuesday, however, when two moderate Democrats from swing districts salvaged a GOP rule vote without giving any heads up to their leadership team. The two Democrats in question — Congressman Jared Golden of Maine and Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington — both serve in districts that President Trump carried in 2024. The rule was adopted by a vote of 210 to 208, with five Republicans voting no. Had either Mr. Golden or Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez voted against adopting the rule, then the measure would have failed and Mr. Johnson would have been unable to bring legislation to the floor this week. On Tuesday night, the top three Democrats in the House — Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clark, and Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar — made clear that they were furious with their two dissenters. “The decision by two of our colleagues to blindside the entire House Democratic Caucus and join with the Republican majority to pass a procedural rule on the brink of failing represents a significant breach of trust,” the three leaders wrote. “It is an action that necessitates a serious response, and we have asked the Committee on Caucus Rules to take this up in short order,” they continued. Mr. Johnson usually has a difficult time corralling his own fellow Republicans into voting for a rule adoption, as Tuesday’s vote showed. Had that rule failed, the speaker may have ended up sending his colleagues home for the next eight weeks in the lead-up to the midterm elections. Mr. Golden and Ms. Gluesenkamp’s decision to hand Mr. Johnson a win, however, opened the floodgates. Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez explained her vote in a vague way, saying in a statement that Washington, D.C., should work the way that her constituents do back in southwestern Washington state. “What the DC bubble doesn’t get is that working waterfronts require working people. Nature is not a terrarium — and you don’t get effective environmentalism without the input of people who make their livelihoods and heritage on the water,” she wrote in a statement. Mr. Golden, meanwhile, was much more explicit. He says that Democratic leadership never asked him how he would vote in the lead-up to the rule measure on Tuesday even though one of his own bills was due to come up as part of that package. His legislation to protect lobstermen in Maine was one of many bills that Republicans decided to put on the floor this week. Mr. Golden is retiring at the end of this year. “They want people to always vote yes or no on procedural votes, even if it were like cutting off their own nose to spite their face,” Mr. Golden told the outlet Out of State, which covers rural America.

Jeffries Promises Punishment for Two House Democrats Who Joined With Republicans To Open the House Floor

Jeffries Promises Punishment for Two House Democrats Who Joined With Republicans To Open the House Floor

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