POLSCI 318 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Parliamentary Procedure, Winnowing, Infographic
4 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Congress and the President
9.30.16 Lecture Notes – Classic Legislative Process (aka Regular Order)
• Under the regular order, bills are introduced and usually have to do with a single, cohesive topic
• Referred to a single committee, and in the committee, they hold hearings, mark-ups, and reports
• House – schedule debate, members can offer germane amendments
o House Parliamentarian decides what is germane and a procedure to contest the
germaneness of an amendment
o Parliamentarian: Individual who is familiar with all the past norms/rules and collect
o Jefferson’s guide to parliamentary procedure is the first in the collection (adopted by
House, not the Senate)
o When he needs to make a ruling, he will go to these volumes and see if particular
procedures are allowed
o Without precedent, the member usually cannot act on that procedure if it contradicts
existing rules
• Senate – minority and majority leader will schedule meetings on the legislation
o Senate members can offer any amendments, doesn’t have to be germane
• Infographic maps out the regular order
• Reconciliation is for budget only (unorthodox)
INTRODUCTION (HOUSE)
• Bills can be introduced only by members of Congress (put into the hopper)
• The text can be written by other (refer to previous notes)
o Can be from an idea originally from the state legislature
o Ex: Amber alert
o A legislation that works really well in the state can spread to other states or become a
federal law
• The bill is dropped in the hopper
• Bills have a 4% chance of making it to law
• Slight departure from regular order – idea that the Speaker can reroute a bill to a committee to his
choice
• Usually, Parliamentarian refers bills to a single committee
• In the committee, the chair can decide whether to hold hearings on that bill
o Around 90% of bills forwarded to committees are never granted hearings and die in
committee
o First winnowing process
o There’s a discharge process for getting a bill out of a committee
• Role of committees (READ ABOUT THEORIES OF COMMITTEES)
o Where Congress gathers information necessary to craft legislation
o Committee takes introduced text and turn it into a piece of legislation that they think can
pass a vote on the floor
o Hearings: gathering information from witnesses
▪ Experts (can include university professors), members of the administration
(Benghazi hearings questioned Clinton)
▪ Bureaucrats
▪ Members of industry (similar to experts)
• Sometimes they call the wrong member of industry
▪ Think tanks
▪ Victims of government malfeasance
▪ Members of the public (can be an interested stakeholder or affected)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
House, not the senate) germaneness of an amendment: when he needs to make a ruling, he will go to these volumes and see if particular, parliamentarian: individual who is familiar with all the past norms/rules and collect. Infographic maps out the regular order procedures are allowed existing rules. Discharge petition petition circulated by a member of the house, requires 218: committee chairs may kill/table a bill if that bill does not benefit the chair"s constituency, 2. Calendar wednesday rule used when the bill is already reported out of the committee. If you think about parties are centralizing units and committees as decentralizing units: with a majority vote, members can force the rules committee to make a rule and the rules committee is not granting a rule, 3. The rules committee can extract a bill from committee: can make rules such that the legislation stuck in the committee or not introduced in.
