Wonk 101: Mommy, Where Do Bills Come From?

MOMocrats is hosting a short series, Wonk 101, to cover some of the intricacies of the legislative process. Why? Well, while School House Rock remains the gold-standard for entertaining and informative, it does gloss over some of the weirder happenings. In an effort to make it easier to understand why there are three versions of health reform percolating in the House and Arlen Specter kept repeating, “There is no Senate bill,” we present this series. Got a burning question about something? Please leave a comment.

I thought this first post would cover how a bill gets written, introduced, and referred to a committee. And the inevitable exceptions to those rules. The next posts will focus on the chaos wonderment that is floor action and the conference process. Given the rage over health care reform, I thought it’d be good to provide a sort of blueprint for following the process.

When Two (or a Couple Thousand) People Love Each Other An Idea... From the thousands of constituent requests, meetings with lobbyists, and handed-down party priorities, a representative might cull a couple dozen ideas in which to actually invest staff time and draft a bill. Alternatively, an outside group might draft a bill and then shop it around to members. In either case, the actual drafting can take months as people duke it out over exact wording (think “It depends on what the meaning of “is” is.)

There are questions to be asked and answered: Will it alter (amend) or repeal existing laws or regulations? Where does it fit in existing federal statutes? Does the counsel’s office think it is constitutional? Is it likely to pass? Who can we partner with? How well funded is the opposition?

What happens next?

House: After drafting, the finished bill is dropped in the hopper, a small box near the Speaker’s seat. After a representative “drops the bill,” it is numbered. There are different kinds of legislation: a bill (H.R.); simple resolutions (H. Res) that do NOT carry any force of law; concurrent resolutions (H. Con. Res.) are passed by both chambers of Congress and do NOT carry any force of law; and joint resolutions (H. J. Res.), that need to be signed into law or vetoed and DO carry the force law.

Once the bill is numbered, the parliamentarian decides which committee(s) have jurisdiction over the bill. The House Parliamentarian is appointed by the Speaker, but he (and it has always been a “he”, House-side) isn’t a political appointee. If he is qualified to serve, then he serves. The current House Parliamentarian, John Sullivan, is only the fourth since 1928 and was appointed in 2004.

Senate: There is no spoon hopper. Senate-side, the bill is simply handed to the clerk for numbering.

The Senate Parliamentarian is Alan Frumin. Mr. Frumin may end up a major player by way of an obscure rule. Which just illustrates my main point: Knowing the rules is vitally important to (a) knowing when someone is trying to sell you a tremendous load of crap and (b) understanding how a guy no one elected and might end up deciding what is in – and what is out – in the Senate version of health care reform (more on that in the next posts).

Committee jurisdiction is pretty self-explanatory. A full list of House Committees is here; Senate Committees are here.

After the bill is numbered, the Government Printing Office, uh, prints the bill, it is loaded into Thomas, and entered into the daily proceedings. The bill’s sponsor (read: author) will try to sign-on cosponsors, particularly folks who sit on the committee(s) that will consider the bill.

Then we wait. And wait, and wait, and wait. Of the 4,000-5,000 bill introduced in the House each legislation session (two years in length), about 400-600 are signed into law. In many cases, the committee never does anything with the legislation – hence the term, “die in committee.”

An important point about reading: With regard to health reform and a whole lot of other legislation, there is hysteria about Not! Reading! The! Bill! To which, I say, “Maybe not.” They have staffers and committee staffers who pre-chew and partially digest material. The Democrats have held a series of health care prep workshops with staffers going through the bill, section-by-section, and taking questions. Reading the entire is good for bragging rights among a certain nerdy sect but some of it is extraneous – reprinting of entire sections of existing law, for example.

In much the same way that people forego reading the entire Bible and instead rely upon their religious leader(s) for interpretation, or Catholics forego reading each of the encyclicals, or the secular among us employ a reader to make it through Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, so too do our representatives rely on secondary sources. Do I think it is acceptable to read none, or very little, of the bill? No. But do I think it is necessary to read every line? Also no.

Oddities: On relatively rare occasion, when a bill is deemed especially necessary or politically important, the committee may have only a limited amount of time to act on a bill. If you look at this page, you’ll see that the Speaker has required action on H.R. 2868 by September 30, 2009 and H.R. 2989 by October 16, 2009. If the committees don’t act by those respective dates then yoink – the bill will go directly to the House floor for action.

On slightly more common occasion, a bill will be taken up without committee action on the “suspension” calendar (suspension of normal rules of order) and passed by unanimous consent. Unanimous consent (UC) is reserved for bills that are non-controversial – think H.R. 1, Ice Cream is Awesome. A single dissenter in either the House or Senate can halt the unanimous consent process. You’ll see a lot more UC’ing of bills near the end of Congress when members experience a sort of senioritis and just want to go home already, yeesh – to expedite unfinished business, they UC a bunch of bills in a flurry of last-minute activity.

Where we are with health care reform: House-side, the bill has been introduced and numbered (H.R. 3200). It has been referred to three committees: Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, and Education and Labor.

Each committee voted on the bill. Each committee altered it with amendments and striking this and that. What version will ultimately appear on the floor is a matter of negotiation between the committee chairs and the Speaker.

Senate-side, the bill has not been formally introduced or numbered. One committee, the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee started working on it and eventually passed a version. Another committee, Senate Finance, is still working. This is where the “Gang of Six” comes in – six members of Senate Finance are meeting to hammer out a compromise. As in the House, which version makes to the floor is a matter for the Majority Leader and committee chairs.

Up Next: Ringling Bros. Ain’t Got Nothing on This Circus (a/k/a Floor Action). 

Comments

[Glennia]

This is a terrific post. Thanks! I never quite understood why some things are UC and others are not. The "can't we just go home now" explanation makes sense.

[Lawyer Mama]

Great post! So basically, a lot of House Republicans and Blue Dogs have suddenly become lactose intolerant? (-;

Now if we can just set this to a catchy tune so I can teach it to my kids! I bought the complete School House Rock set for them and they still refer to D.C. as "the capitol city."