In his Tuesday FoxNews article on two Progressive-Democrats voting in favor of a Republican procedure to advance a bill against the express wishes of Party leadership, Chad Pergram had this comment:

The duo [Congressmen Jared Golden (D, M) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D, WA)] committed something close to a parliamentary heresy, handing the GOP the necessary votes on a procedural matter to unlock the floor for the majority.
Republicans lacked the votes to do it on their own—had Golden and Gluesenkamp not intervened.

Couple things on this. One is that our Congress is not a Parliament where party discipline is a requirement and MPs voting against their leadership is both rare and serious enough to lead directly to the fall of the government. No member of the American Congress is bound to vote the way any party leadership demands. Indeed, Congressmen voting against their party’s leadership has occurred ever since there were political parties in the US—what Washington referred to as factions. Such contrary votes only recently include two Progressive-Democrat Senators voting against a Party budget bill and moving against an effort to get rid of the filibuster.

That these two Progressive-Democrats also didn’t advise Party leadership in advance of their intention was certainly rude, but that’s hardly heresy, Parliamentary or otherwise. I suggest on this, that they gave no heads up because their Party boss, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY), because he is so deeply in the pocket of Party’s Left and its DSA members that he couldn’t be expected to listen to their reasons.

The other thing is that second paragraph in the cite. Republicans lacked the vote because some Republican Congressmen were voting against Republican party leadership by voting against that same procedural matter. This, though, seems no parliamentary heresy in Pergram’s eyes, he made no mention of the dastardly nature of those contrary votes.

Go figure.