Shortly before noon Wednesday, a number of congressional Democrats came to the floor of the U.S. House and announced that they would not leave until the chamber considered gun control legislation. Their “sit-in” lasted well into the night, and at 3 o’clock in the morning the GOP gave up and adjourned the House until early July.
Though some of what transpired yesterday was unprecedented, it is not the first time that members of the minority party have refused to leave the House chamber. In my recent book on the House minority party, I describe two other such occupations. In late 1995, Democrats stayed on the floor for several hours to protest Republicans’ effort to force President Bill Clinton to sign their budget bills. In 2008, Republicans spent the August recess delivering speeches in favor of expanded oil drilling legislation.
Why do floor occupations like these happen? First, it’s because the minority party anticipates both policy and electoral gains. As in 1995 and 2008, the House minority largely agrees on the need for a particular legislative remedy (gun control), has a majority of the public on its side, and expects that bringing attention to the issue will help it and its presidential candidate in the upcoming elections.
Second, occupations happen because the House minority party has very limited control over the legislative agenda. The majority party gets to decide what bills come (and don’t come) to the floor, and it has increasingly limited what amendments are offered to those bills. The House minority party lacks the right of unlimited debate, which was used by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and others last week to force votes in the Senate on gun control bills. Floor protests at least allow the minority to garner attention to bills they can’t bring up for votes.
Third, they are most useful when the House is about to take a recess. The minority party can then claim that it is being responsible by staying in D.C. while the majority “abandons” its duty to legislate. It is no accident that Democrats repeatedly chanted “no bill, no break” during their occupation of the floor, which came two days before lawmakers were scheduled to leave town for a “district work week.”
If history is any guide, yesterday’s “sit-in” is unlikely to produce any legislative victories for Democrats. Republicans went ahead with their budget showdown against President Clinton in 1995, and in 2008 Democrats only permitted a vote on a largely symbolic oil drilling bill. Today’s House Republicans have little incentive to yield to Democrats, and the odds that gun control could pass the House — after failing in the Senate — are slim to none.
But that doesn’t mean floor occupations aren’t effective in other ways. For instance, they help unify the minority party and boost its flagging morale, which can help it win future battles. They serve as a powerful signal to the majority that its treatment of the minority may have become too much to bear. And they can have longer-term effects on the agenda. For instance, during his first term in office, President Obama touted an “all of the above” energy strategy, using the same phrase adopted by House Republicans during their 2008 floor occupation.
There is also something new about yesterday’s protest that may make it more influential than floor occupations of the past: the use of social media. C-SPAN cameras are turned off when the House isn’t in session, and in both 1995 and 2008 individual minority party members tried to find ways around that lack of coverage with only limited success. By contrast, reporters tweeted regular updates Wednesday of the Democrats’ “sit-in,” and several legislators — ignoring the rules of the chamber — sent live video feeds of the protest via Facebook and Periscope (which were also aired by C-SPAN). The event made national news and generated tens of thousands of texts, tweets and posts from U.S. residents.
All of this coverage may make the Democrats’ protest more influential than past occupations of the floor. It may also encourage the minority to stage more of them. So don’t be surprised if we see unhappy minority parties resort to similar protests in the future.
Matthew Green is an associate professor of politics at the Catholic University of America. He is the author of “Underdog Politics: The Minority Party in the House of Representatives.”