Freedom Caucus members stall House floor action over SCORE Act

A handful of members in the House Freedom Caucus on Tuesday delayed action in the House in protest of a bill that regulates compensation college athletes receive based on their name, image and likeness.

Republican Reps. Byron Donalds (Fla.), Scott Perry (Pa.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas) voted with all other Democrats against procedural rule legislation to tee up votes on the Student Compensation and Opportunity Through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act and other measures. 

That opposition stalled the vote at 207-209 as House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) huddled with Roy, House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris (R-Md.), Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) — who had not yet voted — and a few other staff and members. Eventually, Harris and Clyde cast their votes in favor of the measure, and leaders waited for an absent Republican to arrive to pass the rule.

By the time Rep. Michael Rulli (R-Ohio) arrived to cast his vote to allow the rule to pass 210-209, what was supposed to be a five-minute vote had been open for around an hour. Had the vote failed, it would have thwarted leadership’s plans to vote for the rest of the week.

Scalise said after the delay that rocky floor votes are simply the reality in the slim GOP majority, but that he thinks there will be a “bipartisan coalition to pass the bill.”

“There’s some people that have issues with the NCAA, that have issues they don’t want the federal government to have to get involved in this anyway,” Scalise said. 

Scalise said that the bill, which would establish national name, image and likeness (NIL) standards, “gives protection to student-athletes.” The bill also “prohibits institutions, conferences, or interstate intercollegiate athletic associations,” such as the NCAA, from prohibiting student-athletes from entering an NIL agreement.

Roy had forecast his opposition to the SCORE Act in a House Rules Committee hearing on Monday.

“I don’t know what we’re doing, what the powers that we have here in engaging and interfering with states, but if we’re going to take a big federal step because the federal court intervened, and we’re going to intervene, well, then maybe we should fully intervene,” Roy said. 

“Maybe we should fix the damn mess so that we don’t have, you know, 16 teams in the SEC and 17 teams in the ACC and 19 teams in the Big 10, and freaking Stanford and Berkeley on the West Coast in the Atlantic Coast Conference, all because of money. I mean, it’s just laughable that this is anything but … a massive money grab,” he added. 

The opposition that started with Roy, Scalise said, quickly spread to other members.

One House Republican told The Hill that members were frustrated with the process of how the bill came to the floor and the lack of opportunity to offer amendments.

Donalds also expressed that sentiment, NOTUS reported.

“The bigger issue is, why are we jamming it all into one rule again and taking away members’ ability to make amendments on the floor?” Donalds told NOTUS. “I don’t think we should be moving heaven and earth for the NCAA.”