Nancy Pelosi gets formally rebuked on the House floor over an absurd and outrageous rule

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi earned an extremely rare rebuke by the presiding chair of the chamber on Tuesday for calling President Donald Trump's obviously racist attacks on Democratic Congresswoman "racist." But despite that short rebuke, Democrats soon voted to overturn the ruling.

Pelosi delivered the remarks in arguing for the House to condemn Trump's tweets, which told four women of color serving in Congress to "go back" to the countries they came from. Only one of the four women in question is actually an immigrant, and all four are American citizens. It was a paradigmatically racist broadside, but the president has refused to withdraw it, and the Republican Party largely had failed to condemn his racism.

"Every single member of this institution, Democratic and Republican, should join us in condemning the president's racist tweets," the speaker said on the House floor.

But despite the obvious racist nature of the remarks, Pelosi wasn't technically allowed to call Trump's tweets racist. That's because, as Jake Sherman of Politico pointed out, the House has a rule that says "remarks may not refer to the President as: (1) a racist" or "having made a bigoted or racist statement."

Cornell law professor Josh Chafetz, however, noted that this isn't a "standing rule" of the House, but a "precedential ruling of the chair" in the House manual. It is derived, he said, from the English parliamentary practice that prohibited speaking "irreverently or seditiously against the King."

"But it is worth noting that any ruling from the chair--say, a ruling that Pelosi's speech is out of order--can be appealed to the floor and overturned by bare majority," Chafetz explained on Twitter. "So, should the Democrats believe that the precedents holding that calling the president a racist is out of order are themselves out of date and unwise, they can do away with them today."

Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) objected to Pelosi's comments, asking that they be removed from the record in light of the rule. In frustration, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), who was serving as the House chair, abandoned his position. Then Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the House majority leader, took over the chair and ruled against Pelosi's comments.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — who had earlier in the day defended Trump's comments as not racist — was apparently thrilled by this development:

But the victory was short-lived. The House soon voted on the decision to strike down Pelosi's comments, and Democrats — joined by newly independent Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan — vote overwhelmingly against the ruling, preserving the speaker's remarks. The final vote was 190-232.