King of the Hill Rule

"Special rules are highly flexible tools for tailoring floor action to individual bills. Amendments may be limited or prohibited. The order of voting on amendments may be structured. For example, the House frequently adopts a special rule called a king-of-the-hill rule. First used in 1982, a king-of-the-hill rule provides for a sequence of votes on alternative amendments, usually full substitutes for the bill. The last amendment to receive a majority wins, even if it receives fewer votes than some other amendment. This rule allows members to vote for more than one version of the legislation, which gives them freedom both to support a version that is easy to defend at home and to vote for the version preferred by their party’s leaders. Even more important, the procedure advantages the version voted on last, which is usually the proposal favored by the majority party leadership. That is, if four measures were allowed to be voted on and, say, the second one passed by a vote of 435-0, but the fourth one passed by a vote of 218-217, it would be the fourth measure that would be sent to the Senate, despite the fact that a competing measure clearly had drawn more support."

- More here of that special rule which is now history