The Beltway Bible: A Totally Serious A-Z Guide to Our No-Good, Corrupt, Incompetent, Terrible, Depressing, and Sometimes Hilarious Government by Eliot Nelson

Author:Eliot Nelson [Nelson, Eliot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250099266
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-09-27T05:00:00+00:00

Stage 3: Chamber

HOUSE

In the House, committee-reported legislation is put on the chamber’s calendar, though “calendar” is incredibly misleading. A majority of the bills passed out of committee and placed on the House calendar never actually receive a vote. Instead, the majority leadership decides which bills will come up for a vote. Again, it’s good not to piss off the speaker.

Be warned, the House’s standard legislative procedure is a little wonky, and if it makes you feel like you’re staring at an Escher sketch—an endless, Möbius band of fat white guys in power ties—stare at this for a minute or two and then proceed:

Committee report → Rules Committee → Entire House votes on rules package → Committee of the Whole debates amendments → Entire House votes on amendments → Motion to recommit → Final vote

Got it? No? Look, I tried. You try making a mnemonic for that.

Bills that aren’t deemed too controversial, or that have been previously agreed upon by leaders from the majority and minority, are usually voted under a “suspension of the rules,” which limits debate to a scant forty minutes and forbids amendments. However, suspending the rules requires a two-thirds vote for passage. Otherwise, the Rules Committee will craft a special rules package for the bill, allowing just enough amendments and debate time to please a majority of members (preferably a strong majority, and preferably made up of members of the majority party). Before the chamber can begin deliberation on an item, it must adopt the Rules Committee package.

The Rules Committee is a standing House panel that sets the parameters on how certain bills will be considered on the floor. The panel selects which of the sometimes hundreds of proposed amendments will be considered by the entire House. It also limits the amount of time allocated for debate and the parliamentary procedures required to bring the final vote. Rules Committee membership skews heavily toward the majority party, and its members are handpicked by the speaker, giving him or her significant power over floor debate. The Rules Committee is known around the Hill as “the House’s traffic cop,” and it deserves more credit than it gets for keeping politicians from talking more than they have to.

With regards to our child labor bill, which is definitely not going to garner two-thirds support for a suspension of the rules, the Rules Committee might include an amendment allowing companies to force children who lose fingers to first seek redress through a mediator—as a nod to corporate donors hoping to avoid multimillion dollar lawsuits; or one providing tax credits to the manufacturer of ratty Dickensian sack coats—as a nod to the Ways and Means chairman who will be instrumental in a forthcoming tax bill and who is trying to keep a major textile manufacturer in his district from outsourcing; or one limiting redress with the National Labor Relations Board for children caught in Morbark 3036 industrial drum chippers—as a nod to Northwestern logging interests.

Debate will probably be limited.

Once the rules package is set

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.