The process has a number of specific steps. If the bill makes it through all the steps in the chamber in which it was introduced the "first house" , it goes to the other chamber or "second house" and goes through the same steps there. Each step is identified and explained below. Prefiling: Members can prefile bills for introduction in the month before session begins.
Prefiled bills are officially introduced the first day of the session. Introduction, or First Reading: The first thing that happens to bills on the "floor" is introduction and referral to committee. This is also referred to as the bill's first reading. Bills must have three readings in each house in order to pass the Legislature. Leadership determines to which committees bills will be referred; this is usually determined by the bill's subject matter.
Bills that require an appropriation or that raise revenue must also go to a fiscal committee for review. To see which bills will be introduced for the upcoming legislative day, go to the Agendas, Schedules, and Calendars page and display House Introductions or Senate Introductions.
Committee Action: The chair of each committee works with leadership and staff to schedule bills to be heard by the committee.
Committees hold three kinds of meetings: 1 work sessions, where issues are determined and reviewed; 2 public hearings, where testimony from interested parties is taken; and 3 executive sessions, where the committee decides how it will report the bill to the whole house.
Not all bills get scheduled for hearing, so a good number of bills never get any further than committee. Bills can be reported in several fashions, the most usual being do pass pass the bill just as it is , do pass as amended pass the bill as amended by the committee , and do pass substitute the committee offers a different version to take the place of the original bill.
The members on the prevailing side sign the "majority" report; those members who disagree with the majority sign the "minority" report. Not all bills coming out of committee have minority reports.
To see a list of bills reported out of House or Senate committee each day, go to Standing Committee Reports. As a bill moves through the committee process, the staff prepares the "bill report. The bill report is edited as the bill moves through the process. When the bill moves to the opposite house, that house prepares a bill report as well.
A bill that has finally passed the Legislature would have House, Senate, and Final bill reports. At the start of the session, both houses agree on dates by which bills have to be reported out of committee in order to be eligible for further consideration by the Legislature. There is a "cut-off" date for bills to be out of committee in the first house and one for bills to be out of committee in the second house.
Rules Committee: Once a bill has been reported by the appropriate committee s , the floor acts on the committee report and then passes the bill to the Rules Committee. Usually, the floor adopts the committee's recommendation. The Rules Committee is where leadership exercises the most control over the process.
The Rules Committee is made up of members from both parties. Each member on the committee gets to select two or three bills that will move on to the next step in the process. Which bills a member selects could be the result of a party caucus, or another member approaching that member, or a piece of legislation about which the member feels strongly.
Rules Committee members review the bills and decide whether or not to move them on to the next step. Sometimes bills skip this step and go to the calendar for second reading.
It is another step that allows leadership to control the process. Those bills that will probably require some debate are placed on the regular calendar. It's an instrument for the Senate majority to ram through legislative priorities over minority opposition. The reconciliation procedure enables the member Senate to pass measures with a simple majority vote, instead of the 60 votes required by Senate rules to stop debates known as " filibusters.
Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris can break a tie, giving the party a majority. Reconciliation came into being as part of the Congressional Budget Act of It was designed to enable lawmakers to adjust spending or revenues to comply with a budget blueprint without supermajority support.
The law was one of several Congress passed in the s establishing exceptions to the vote filibuster rule. Others included fast-track procedures for Congress to approve trade agreements, or to limit the president's ability to commit troops overseas. Reconciliation has become a favored route to enable a president to pass trademark legislation. It has been used over 20 times since Bush and Donald Trump used it to cut them.
But majority parties can't use the process all the time. Democrats can pass a big bill through the Senate without any Republican votes. If President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress want to get anything done, they will likely depend on an obscure but powerful procedural tool.
Democrats hold 50 seats Senate. The filibuster would force Democrats to get support from at least 10 Republicans to pass most legislation. There is already debate about whether Democrats should just eliminate the filibuster altogether and pass whatever they want with a simple majority. But absent such a big step, they are left with budget reconciliation. They can pass a reconciliation bill with just 50 votes. But reconciliation also comes with certain conditions, limiting what policies can pass through this special process, and that makes legislating a lot more complicated.
Democrats control the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the White House, which in theory gives them the power to make laws. Almost all bills, but not those passed via the process called budget reconciliation.
Under this special procedure, a bill can be brought up for a vote and pass with a simple majority. But using a budget reconciliation bill, they can pass any bill they want, within the limitations that govern the reconciliation process.
Biden and senators from both parties are talking a good game about bipartisanship in the post-Trump, post-storming of the Capitol era. But partisan politics has a way of taking over any legislative debate. Democrats may find that in order to pass a Covid relief bill, or other major priorities on taxes, health care, and the environment, they need to muscle through a bill using budget reconciliation. A lot of things — so long as they affect federal spending and revenue.
Reconciliation was established as part of the Congressional Budget Act of , driven by lawmakers concerned about the growing federal deficit. The process begins with a congressional resolution instructing committees in the House and the Senate to draw up legislation. The budget resolution sets the first parameter for what can pass via budget reconciliation: The final bill must reduce or increase the federal deficit by no less or no more than the amount specified in the resolution.
That became the target as Republicans decided which taxes to cut and which to raise. The provisions that are included in the reconciliation bill must then somehow change federal spending or federal revenue. Raising and lowering taxes, expanding subsidies for health insurance, and spending money on new infrastructure projects are some of the obvious, much-discussed ideas that could be included in a reconciliation bill.
Reconciliation was used at first in the s to approve Reagan-era spending cuts, but quickly senators started to use reconciliation for policies unrelated to its original purpose. One reconciliation bill was used to reduce the number of board members on the Federal Communications Commission.
In the eyes of Senate institutionalists like Robert Byrd of West Virginia, these were abuses of the reconciliation process. So Byrd proposed and the Senate codified constraints on what can be passed through budget reconciliation, to make sure the process was actually used for matters affecting the federal budget.
Those constraints are now colloquially called the Byrd Rule. To borrow an example that came up a lot during the recent health care debates, changing insurance regulations might not comply with the Byrd Rule. While those changes would surely affect federal spending the government spends money subsidizing health insurance, so changes to its cost would alter federal outlays , their main policy purpose would be to affect what kind of health coverage people receive.
Unelected bureaucrats. Kidding — sort of. There are two important referees in the reconciliation process: the Congressional Budget Office and the Senate parliamentarian.
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