I've been tracking this for a long time, and now CQ (subscription) says the results are in:

A New Recommit Record
By Jennifer Scholtes, CQ Staff

As records go, this one could have been just a tiny bit better if Republican critics of $700 billion financial bailout bill had been able to offer one more motion to recommit.

But even though they were unable to use the parliamentary maneuver on the historic measure, House Republicans still managed to rack up a new record for the 110th Congress — 120 motions to recommit overall, more than doubling the previous record of 56 set by the 109th Congress.

More worrisome still than the ridiculous number of MTRs is this:

Within that record was another record — 24 of the 120 motions were actually adopted, far exceeding the old record of 6 set by the 106th Congress.

This is ridiculous. I've had my disagreements with others who maintain that it's really nothing to worry about, but in my opinion, the approach of the Democratic Caucus and the leadership to dealing with these motions to recommit cost Democrats the ability to work as a functioning majority on a number of critical bills. The counterclaim to this is, of course, that Democrats were able to gain and then expand their majority because they allowed their members the freedom to "vote their districts" on MTRs, meaning that Dems were allowed to vote with the GOP on these procedural stunts so they wouldn't be subject to attack ads accusing them of voting against them.

But the numbers alone should tell you something about how out of control things have gotten. They didn't just break these records, they shattered them, allowing the minority to pass four times the previous record number of MTRs. And what does that kind of success encourage the minority to do? Offer more MTRs, of course. More than double the previous record. Yes, that's twice as many MTRs offered, but four times the success rate.

Not a problem? Really?

Well, I'm not sure everyone agrees. In fact, I'm positive that they don't. Certainlynot Maxine Waters (D-CA-35):

[A]s I watched Democratic leaders organize "yea" votes on this motion, I was convinced that Democrats are traveling down a path of complicity on motions to recommit the likes of which we have never seen before. I cannot help but wonder if our Caucus will be torn apart by frequent support for Republican motions to recommit. I find myself wondering, "Where will this end?"

But Waters isn't alone in her concern.

Earlier, I said that CQ was now saying the results were in, but the truth is that that article was dated October 7th. I've just been holding it for a good opportunity to discuss it. And Roll Call (also subscription) now gives me reason to do so:

Republicans are gearing up for a battle to protect a parliamentary maneuver that has helped them remain relevant in the face of a Democratic majority.

Democrats contend that no decision has been made on whether to move forward with a rule change for motions to recommit, but the prospect has Republicans in an uproar.

Democratic leaders have reason to want the procedure eliminated or tweaked.

In the 110th Congress, Republicans were able to lure vulnerable Democrats into voting for motions to recommit. Those motions previously had been dismissed as purely partisan procedural votes when Republicans were in the majority.

As a result, 25 motions to recommit passed in the 110th, as opposed to 14 in the 12 years that Democrats were the minority party.

From the 101st to the 109th Congress, only 7.6 percent of motions passed the House, according to a Feb. 2 Congressional Research Service report.

So yeah, it's more than just lonely Maxine Waters with serious concerns about the MTR and what it's done to the ability of Democrats to function as a majority. But an attempt to eliminate or seriously curtail the ability of the minority to use MTRs would cause problems of its own:

"That would blow things up in the House on the first day," said Don Wolfensberger, director of the Congress Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Wolfensberger, who served as the Republican chief of staff for the House Rules Committee in the 104th Congress and is now a contributing writer to Roll Call, said any attempt by House Democrats to further marginalize the GOP minority is at odds with President-elect Barack Obama’s message of bipartisan cooperation.

Wolfensberger is exactly right in saying it would blow things up in the House. In a fit of frustration over the Republican use of MTRs in mid-2007, if I recall the timing correctly, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD-05) did in fact raise the prospect of a rules change, and the Republicans proceeded to grind things to a halt with a week's worth of procedural delays in protest against the threat.There's no doubting that they'd do the exact same thing if threatened again.

And while I'm not sure I agree or care much for Wolfensberger's second assessment -- that the change (they can't believe in) would be at odds with Obama's message of bipartisan cooperation -- I'm certain that the ensuing protest could put a serious crimp in the drive to pass the opening salvos of whatever legislative agenda the new administration puts forward. And I think we all know how that'll be reported. Dems control both Congress and the White House, yet nothing's happening, yadda, yadda...

I'll go out on a limb and say that there's another Republican who has assessed the situation correctly, too:

[Jo] Maney [a spokesperson for Rep. David Dreier (R-CA-26)] said Democrats never settled on an internal strategy on how to deal with the parliamentary maneuvers, which forced Democrats to pull several bills, creating chaos on the House floor on at least one occasion.

I do believe there was no coherent Democratic strategy on how to deal with MTRs. I think that's evidenced both by the record numbers of them that were offered and passed, and by Maxine Waters' letter. With Rahm Emanuel now installed at the White House, though, one of the chief architects of what little there was that passed for Democratic strategy on MTRs is now out of the picture. So perhaps a better approach can be designed. My preference is for the old way of dealing with them. That is, voting them down routinely as procedural annoyances. While it's certainly possible that the Republicans will take their use of MTRs more seriously and will thus offer a few tweaks here and there that are genuinely valuable, in general Democrats ought not to feel too uncomfortable about voting down anything that can be brought to the floor sight unseen and is only debatable for ten minutes. No rank-and-file Democrat would ever be afforded an opportunity to pull a surprise amendment out of his pocket with no notice and change or even kill a bill entirely with it in ten minutes or less. So why give that power to Republicans?

What did the MTR cost us in the last Congress? I think we lost a lot of leverage in the FISA debate, for one thing, although the reality is that we probably would have ended up losing that fight no matter what. (Even if we'd passed a good law, the Bush-Cheney "administration" wouldn't have obeyed it.)

But there's another concrete example:

Republicans used the motion to recommit for one of their earliest victories in the 110th Congress: In March 2007, the GOP blocked a Washington, D.C., voting rights bill by tying it with legislation to lift the city’s gun ban. Knowing what was coming, Pelosi pulled the voting rights bill from the floor.

Things didn't work out so well on the city's gun ban in the end, did they? The Supreme Court struck it down this year, upholding a D.C. Circuit court ruling that had already been made by the time of the MTR. So the Republicans got their way on the gun ban in the end, and Democrats were defeated in passing a voting rights bill for DC. Dems couldn't even hold it together to vote the MTR down and declare that they were for letting the courts handle it, as they already were. So we hit into the double play to end the inning on that one. Awesome strategy!

This is an issue that definitely calls for some reform. But I don't know that a rules change is the best way to go about it. Dems just need to get together and remind the caucus what's a stake, the procedural reasons why you don't want to encourage the use of these motions, and make it clear that the leadership will have an eye on those votes and who strays on them.