Not today.
Roberts--which is what the Congress started with long ago--is funny and unless you know that set of rules, committees run other those rules seem capricious.
If you know you're going to lose a vote but want to keep the option open to revisit it later, you have somebody vote in the majority. Because under Roberts rules, the losing side can't opt to have a second chance--only the winning side. Seems insane, when a (D) or (R) votes to kill a (D) or (R) bill (respectively) that would fail without their vote they're condemned--sometimes it's just tactics. We seen that in Congress, so that rule must still be around. (I don't know of Sturgis admits of that.)
Quorum calls are another thing. You need a quorum to start to conduct business (with some weirdness that doesn't matter because ultimately it all goes back to the committee, which can do what it wants). But if you lose quorum, you know--it doesn't matter. The chair doesn't have to recognize that quorum's broken. But quorum calls are points of order and must be heard--it includes things like "open the window" and every member has the right to raise points of order. If the committee I was running way back when lost quorum we just kept on going. If a person was there that knew they'd be on the losing side--either because allies left so they wouldn't be a majority or supermajority, or simply because he knew they'd have lost with everybody there but wants to stall for time--a quorum call would be asked for the second the last member required for quorum left the room. Now, if all those opposed to a measure walked out and nobody was left to ask for a count of members for re-establishing quorum, I was fine with that. The only time that this hamstrung us was when the bylaws or charter required that for a motion for a specific topic required a majority of the membership. For some things--we had 23 members one year, I was ex-officio chair without vote--if we had 11 members present things like the budget couldn't be voted on. But if we wanted to do a number of things--appoint people to positions, put something on a ballot, allocate amounts from the approved budget for specific categories, hell, without a quorum count we could have gone down to 1 person. (That never happened, but we were down to 5 or 6 a few times.)
Don't know Senate committee rules. I'll be interested in whether the parliamentarian rules with respect to the rules or "what's right"--and if the idiot media will actually bother to say why her ruling is what it is.
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