By now, even the C-SPAN junkies among you have probably turned the channel, as the House plods through consideration of the State Department and Foreign Operations Appropriations bill. Last week, you may have watched the House struggle a bit with some planned Republican obstructionism in working through the Homeland Security bill, and you may have wondered, "What the hell are they doing, anyway?"
If you were puzzled at all by the seemingly endless parade of speakers, or by the magic words they would utter as they rose -- "Mr. Speaker, I move to strike the last word" -- you were not alone.
What you were watching was the result of bringing those appropriations bills to the floor under "open" rules -- that is, a special rule controlling debate, adopted by the House before consideration of the bill itself (called the "underlying bill"), which essentially allows for an unlimited number of amendments to be considered. When the opposition party is feeling feisty, they can gum up the works with literally hundreds of amendments, calling for a vote on each one. This sometimes leads the majority to consider legislation under a closed rule, which allows no amendments, or only those pre-approved by the Rules Committee (usually at the suggestion of the Chair of the committee that wrote the bill). In between, there are varying types of rules. Modified open rules, modified closed rules, plus wacky hybrid rules like the King/Queen of the Hill, which are ridiculous enough that we'll set their discussion aside for now.
Almost all bills that come to the floor in the House are, technically speaking, considered by the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union, or Committee of the Whole for short. As the name implies, this "committee" includes every single Member of the House (including Delegates and the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, who now have voting rights in the Committee of the Whole), and it's a kind of fiction invented to allow the House to operate under the more efficient and flexible procedures a regular committee would use -- the most important being the ability to debate bills for manageable and appropriate periods of time. Standing House Rules would otherwise default to the "one hour rule," (PDF) which, depending on how it's used, would either limit debate on any bill to a total of one hour (the usual practice), or would technically allow any amendment to the bill (and amendments to the amendment) to also be debated for an hour. And you can see where that goes. One hour total is too short. One hour per amendment is too long. So instead, the House pretends it's a committee, where everyone gets five minutes instead of an hour.
Have I lost you yet?
OK, so when the House Committee of the Whole is operating under the five minute rule, everybody gets to offer amendments. What's more, everybody gets to claim five minutes of time to speak to any or all of those amendments, though they often use the time to talk about the underlying bill, too.
That's what the magic words are about. When a Member is recognized and says, "Mr. Speaker, I move to strike the last word," they are doing two things. One is that they're forgetting that they're operating in the Committee of the Whole, during which time the person with the gavel is referred to as the Chairman or Chairwoman, and not the Speaker -- but that's not important. The second thing is the important one. When they move to strike the last word, they're claiming five minutes of time to speak. Technically, what they're doing is making a motion to strike the last word in the amendment under consideration, thereby proposing to change the language of the amendment, making it a new amendment for the purposes of starting the five minute clock on debate again.
You'll sometimes hear a Member move to "strike the requisite number of words," which is a technical acknowledgment of the fact that the first person to strike the last word has already moved the amendment consisting of the original text minus that last word, and that the right to claim time actually depends on being recognized to offer a "new" amendment, which means you'd have to strike the last two words. And if you're the third, fourth, or 98th Member to seek five minutes to speak on an amendment and you've lost track of how many words have been struck, you can just move to strike the requisite number. But in practice, nobody cares, and they just recognize you if you move to strike the last one.
So that's it. It won't change your life, but it might just make you feel better about understanding some of the craziness happening on the House floor one day.
Look, if I don't write these things down, they bounce around in my head and distract me. What can I tell you? If you had something important to do, you wouldn't be here in the middle of the day.