WASHINGTON _ House Republicans on Monday night rejected a proposal that would have dissolved the Appropriations Committee and put its discretionary spending authority in the hands of the authorizing committees, among other sweeping proposed changes to House rules.
The proposal, from Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., was strongly condemned ahead of the closed-door meeting by House Appropriations Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., who said adopting the Nunes amendment to a rules package would take the unified Republican Congress in the "wrong direction."
"Rewriting the committee system in the midst of the effort to undo eight years of Obama and install Republican priorities will be a major distraction and invite discord within our conference," Frelinghuysen wrote in a Dear Colleague letter dated Monday.
The Senate, he wrote, is not considering a parallel proposal, which means if Nunes' amendment was folded into the House's rules for the next two years, the plan "would create a disconnect between the House and Senate on moving legislation, threatening further inaction at exactly the time we need to be ready to act."
It was unclear how many Republicans had gathered on Monday night in the Longworth House Office Building to discuss rules changes that had been circulating during the recess.
Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., a senior appropriator and the outgoing chairman of the panel, said the Nunes amendment was rejected "big time." When asked about the breakdown, he said, "I think it was about 49, something, 39 to 49 for the amendment," and more than 140 members who voted against it.
Rogers also said that an amendment by Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte, R-Va., that would rename the Office of Congressional Ethics as the Office of Congressional Complaint Review was adopted. Rogers said it was a recorded vote but he did not recall the tally, and he supported it.
The 115th Congress convenes on Tuesday.
If approved, the Nunes amendment would have given the House Rules Committee until Nov. 1 to "reassign appropriations jurisdiction to the relevant standing or select committee." In a letter sent to his colleagues on Dec. 30, Nunes urged House Republicans to "streamline the appropriations process, empower individual members of Congress and restore Congress' constitutional authority."
"In recent years, Congress has greatly forfeited the power of the purse," Nunes wrote. "Weaknesses in the appropriations process have hindered congressional budget making and enabled executive overreach, thus preventing Congress from exercising its constitutional authority."
