Dear fellow parliament nerds, I am pleased to report that my book "Unparliamentary" can now be pre-ordered :-) I'm so excited I might have used some unparliamentary language when they told me :-P utppublishing.com/doi/book/10....

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the House of Commons... one of my favourite Hansard editor's insertions:

TIL: The 🐄 does casual Thursdays.

Interesting. Typically they only use two-minute votes for amendments and motions to suspend the rules, not bigger stuff like this.

‘Closure having been invoked...’ 🇬🇧💪 The senators in the chair have been doing this a lot lately.

‘“But this is not a parliamentary system, so you can’t call a special election,” the member said. “We have to deal with whatever we’ve got until the first Monday in January in 2027.”’ Well... www.notus.org/house/aca-su...

He could, and he knows this because earlier this year he did it to Luna’s discharge petition on proxy voting.

Maybe giving the speaker unilateral adjournment/recess authority wasn’t such a great idea.

I don’t know what exactly happened, but ‘the Chair will not close a vote while a Member is in the well attempting to vote’.

4.

On the abuse of points of order:

From the archives - a UK parliamentary Christmas carol (?) published in 1894.

For fellow devolution anoraks and legislature lovers, this is an interesting topic but one which arguably applies to legislatures in many jurisdictions (including elsewhere in the UK) rather than being a uniquely Holyrood problem www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

🧐🧐🧐 The rule did not provide for the amendments to be decided en gros; upon objection, the question should have been put on each one individually.

If you unexpectedly win a voice vote, maybe it’s not the best idea to demand a record vote.

It’s great to see that the House is finally dealing with the speaker’s practice of refusing to send bills to the Senate.

“Editor’s note: This article is totally wrong.”

Interesting.

It’s so cool to see the House consider a measure under the terms of the discharge rule.

👍

I was wondering when the House would take these up; the committee reported them in April.

It seems Deschler’s is a higher authority on Senate rules than Riddick’s. Understandable.

A precedent* that the House may not do what it’s proposing to do here ⬇️ * – It’s a pretty soft one, but that’s to be expected with things like this since the chair may not rule on constitutional questions.

😳

Now where have I heard this before?

It’s that time of year again.

Why are they using some random bill as a legislative vehicle when the Senate-passed NDAA (S. 2296) is right there? docs.house.gov/billsthiswee...

Stumbled upon this survey on how state legislatures limit debate (or don't) – filibusters & cloture – from the Office of Legislative Research of CT's General Assembly. It is dated. But I'm posting it to note, if you've ever thought, "I wonder how states do that?"… 1/ www.cga.ct.gov/2009/rpt/200...

Back before Politico… Yahoo… CNN… C-Span… BNA's Daily Tax & Trade Report(er)s… and even Roll Call (the newspaper)… there was Congressional Quarterly's 👍🏻 indispensable 👍🏻 weekly report. And its (sometimes ~3" thick) Almanac. Here, an excerpt from 1987, from its review of the filibuster*… #SRules 1/

Today in Canadian parliamentary history — December 4, 1980: MP Anguish is anguished over whether “verbal diarrhea” is unparliamentary. Unfortunately, his Point Of Order (POO) was late. And when a POO is late, the Speaker must flush it -- procedurally speaking that is.

How odd, as time passes on a Thursday afternoon, to see the number of senators voting go UP by >10%. 😳 The "Let's Not Expand the En Bloc Precedent Caucus"? Or the "Let's Not Embarrass Thune Caucus"?

😳

The quality of debate was better back in the day. Back in the day:

Yesterday I shared the Royal Warrant and Letters Patent that formalized Andrew's loss of royal status. Today: my analysis of their numerous drafting anomalies, evidence of Whitehall's increasingly fuzzy grasp of constitutional minutiae. venerablepuzzle.wordpress.com/2025/12/02/t...

The Gingerbread Capitol is back

As of yesterday, Golden or any other member who signed this discharge petition can give notice of their intent to offer it.

TIL: An instance in which a resolution was held not to constitute a question of privilege because it contained unparliamentary language.

"Republicans will never allow articles of impeachment to be brought to the floor of the House of Representatives, and we know that's the case." This is a flat-out 100% lie from @hakeem-jeffries.bsky.social and he knows it. Impeachment resolutions are privileged, they can force a vote at any time.

Blocking the transmission of legislation is among the worst abuses of power by any Speaker in House history. It's become very common under Johnson.

in legislative news?

Researching a bit of historic Budget trivia and TL;DR- it's Gladstone. It's always Gladstone. The red box? Gladstone. The tradition the Chancellor can drink while speaking? Gladstone. Longest Budget speech? Gladstone. Most Budget speeches? Gladstone.

As for (2), not ideal that the speaker could unilaterally adjourn the House!

Hallmark announced its holiday movies, but C-SPAN remains silent 🤔 Here are some suggestions: 1) Miracle on the 218th signature 2) A Muppets Christmas Conference Committee 3) It's a wonderful shutdown 4) Rudolph the red-nosed (continuing) resolution 5) ¡Feliz Filibuster! 🎄

Good! Members will then have no choice but to turn to more interesting ways of bringing up their bills... www.axios.com/2025/11/21/m...

Yes, the chair (in their capacity as a member) may object to a unanimous-consent request.

The House is doing this so often that you’d think members would have learnt the proper terminology by now.

The House has voted unanimously to repeal the provisions in the shutdown package which allow GOP Senators to sue the federal government and get as much as $1 million in damages - because the feds looked at their phone records in the Jan. 6 investigation.

Two months later, the Senate has agreed to this request.

And then there’s the matter of enrolling the bill and presenting it to the president.