Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Well, here it is. So this is coming a mile away. You sure got a clone of a lot of stuff to get to this Capitol building here in Washington. Well I wonder who that satellite scrap of paper is. I'm just a Bill. Yes, I'm only a Bill. And I'm sitting here on Capitol. Do kids even know about this? School House Rock? No, it was an educational animated TV show from the 1970s. I think we should ask a student. Do you have one in mind? Hello. This is Nick Greg. It is Nick. What's up, Adia? Hi, Adia. Hi, Adia. Adia Sambaque was our first student contest winner. She's a civics friend. She had just finished taking a test when I called her. What was the test on? She had a new deal program and then described how some of them still exist in real life. And then talk about how they were successful or not in ending the Great Depression. I asked her if she knew this song, I'm just a Bill. Yes, I had to watch it in four or three. We didn't even know what I remember that. Whether I just hooked up the press, if I'd be like a Bill becoming law. Oh gosh, I know how Bill becomes a law, but not what the hell for best of this and you know. So then I called a teacher, Eliza Ross, she teaches high school AP Gov. I asked her if she shows it to her class. Every time. Oh yeah! They love it. They ask for it. And then there's always like one or two kids that are like, "I've never seen it." And then I feel like they have to see it. I think that there are some details that are definitely missing. So it's missing. It's a Bill. We'll be following Bob. Spinning the rules and passing HR 3-1. There are a lot of wisdom, millions of Americans tune into Duck Dynasty. So I want to point out just a few words of wisdom from Duck Dynasties. I'm a D.O. Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution Civil Rights. That's probably good for all of us to hear. Thank you all. I'm Nick Capady-Chan. And I'm Hannah McCarthy. And today on Civics 101 in our Starter Kit series, we are going to follow that thread through the labyrinth. We are going to see how a Bill really becomes a law. And I wasn't dragging on schoolhouse rock. It taught me that bills are really an ideas that are proposed. They go through committee, get voted on, go to the other house, and up on the president's desk, zip-zapzapzapzaps your uncle. So that's the sort of ideal version it's supposed to work? This is Eleanor Powell. She's the Boothfowler Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin. In practice, it very rarely works that way. And it's certainly not that simple. So in this unorthodox messy world in which we live, essentially there are two paths. Two roads diverged in a chamber of Congress. So one is the really easy path where essentially everybody's on the same page. There's not a lot of bipartisan disagreement. There's not a lot of conflict. What happens is essentially both chambers use these expedited procedures. The other path, the path of most legislation that you actually read about in the paper and you hear about in the news is the stuff that's more controversial where there's more partisan disagreement. That stuff gets hard and very messy. We're going to follow the complicated path for now. So part one, coming up with it. So the first thing is you have to come up with a bill. You have to have an idea and then you have to translate that idea into what's called legislative language. I talked to Andy Wilson. He's a former staffer on Capitol Hill. An actual bill that adds to or amends some part of the United States code of laws. Members of Congress work with their staff to write bills. They can also get help if they need it from the non-partisan office of legislative council. Experts on legal language and how to write laws. So sometimes when you have the idea and you have a written, you take some time to gather up support for the bill as co-sponsors before you introduce it. If you've got several members of Congress as co-sponsors to a bill, that's like a signal that this bill has lots of support. Co-sponsors are just adding their name to it. They might not even read the thing. Bills in the house can have a few co-sponsors. They can have hundreds of co-sponsors, which makes them many times more likely to become a law. And as to crafting a bill, I never knew this. Anybody can write one. Special interest groups, lobbyists, people who are raising money for your campaign. It just has to be proposed by a member of Congress. So once you, along with your staff, the Office of Legislative Council, and anyone else who's fancy, have written a bill. Where does it go? In the house, you have to take it down to the clerk of the house, which is a team of people that sit near where the president gives the state of union address every year. And you actually have to drop the physical piece of paper with the legislative language on it into a box. And that box is called the Hopper. The Hopper? Yes. In 2003, they replaced their Hopper from the 1950s. It's just a wooden box. But the clerk takes the bill, gives it a number. It's in sequential order. So the first one in the new Congress is HR1, House Resolution 1, or S1, Senate Resolution 1. And then it's assigned to the relevant committee based on whatever the topic of the bill is. So if it's a bill that has to do with foreign policy, it's directed to the Foreign Relations Committee. If it's got to do with foreign policy, it's referred to the Agriculture Committee, and so on. Who is in charge of deciding what committee it gets assigned to? That is the speaker of the House or the Senate Parliamentarian. Sometimes it even goes to more than one committee. All right. Written, dropped in the Hopper, assigned a number, and assigned to a committee. Right. Part 2. Committee. The House has 20 permanent committees. The Senate has 17. And there's also four joint committees, which have members of both the House and the Senate. The committees are formed to have expertise in a particular area so that they can be the first line of review of a particular topic instead of the whole House having to look at every little thing. So it's both to have a deeper expertise on a given topic when looking at the various proposals that come before Congress and to have a little bit better process and have a more wield the way in which the Congress can do its business. So who gets to be on these committees? Before each new Congress, every two years, there's a committee committee who chooses who gets to be in the committees. But what's most important about committees is that whichever party has a majority in the House or the Senate also has the majority in every single committee. For example, in 2019, the Agriculture Committee in the House has more Democrats than Republicans and the Agriculture Committee in the Senate has more Republicans than Democrats. So that's why one of the reasons why the party that's in majority has so much power because they really have the ability to set the agenda to set the terms of the debate and to ultimately decide what is voted on and what is in committee and in the full House or the full Senate. These bills get read. Sometimes for the very first time, they get hearings, their discussed experts are called in to speak to the effects of a bill, they get marked up. Amendments are added. Question. It's about amendments to bills, the kinds of things that can be added. Did you see the speech that John Stewart gave the House Committee on that 9/11 first responder bill? It'll get stuck in some transportation bill or some appropriations bill and get sent over to the Senate where a certain someone from the Senate will use it as a political football to get themselves maybe another new import tax on petroleum. Because that's what happened to us in 2015. What was he talking about? That line stuck out to me and I emailed Andy about it and he said that in the House, amendments to bills have to be "german". That means that they are relevant to the bill at hand. But in the Senate, there is no germane rule. You can propose any amendments on any topic whatsoever to a bill. So, if you're a senator and you can't get your own bill to the floor and it doesn't have a lot of support, one thing you can do is get someone in a committee to put the stuff you want as a writer to another different, totally irrelevant bill. But this time period, this process of committee is where most bills die. And it's not because people vote on them in the committee and they say, "This is a bad bill, it just they never get out of committee. So much time and effort." And it just dies on the vine. It can simply disappear into the committee ether and never be heard from again. And if a bill doesn't make it to the floor for a vote in a Congress, it's dead. You have to start from the beginning and then next Congress. 90% of bills die in committee. Are committee members required to do anything like give a bill a hearing? No, they can just put it in the endless to-do pile. All right, so what if by luck and determination and bipartisan support a bill survives the committee process and the committee reports it out and says, "This thing is ready for a vote? Is it then put on the calendar?" Absolutely not. No way. In the House of Representatives, the Speaker of the House decides which bill to make it out of committee gets the floor for a vote. And in the Senate, it's the Senate majority leader who decides what gets voted on. Theoretically, can the Speaker of the House or the Senate majority leader just kill a bill by not letting it get to a vote? Up until now, I've been talking about the House process and the Senate process as being pretty much the same. But here we have a major difference. The Speaker of the House, yes, can kill a bill. But there is a rarely enacted check on that power. It's called a dead-end.
discharge petition, or if a majority of members of the house sign a physical petition, a piece of paper, that bill then gets brought out of committee and onto the floor for debate. What's the check in the Senate? Nothing. There's no discharge petition in the Senate. If the Senate Majority Leader does not want your bill to get voted on, there will be no vote. The only check on this power is election. The American people voting in a new majority party. Wanna talk about debate? Yes, sure. Part three. Debate. First off, the House. In the House, there's a really interesting and weird process called the Rules Committee, where any bill that's gonna be debated on the full House has to go through the Rules Committee, where the Rules Committee votes on and determines what the terms of the debate will be. How much time will be allotted to each side? What amendments might be in order and when the sort of the votes would be taking place? Generally, that's all controlled by the Speaker of the House. The Red Rule provides one hour of debate on the motion equally divided and controlled by the chair and the rank of minority members. This is why you hear, "I yield the remainder of my time to the Congresswoman from Delaware." But. And the Senate. Do you like green eggs and ham? There is no rules. I do not like them, Sam. I have a reason to talk. As long as you like. Would you like them here or there? I would not like them here or there. I would not like them anywhere. I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them. It's worth actually talking about what a filibuster is. This is Elvin Orpahel again, and that was Texas Senator Ted Cruz reading green eggs and ham and an attempt to block the Affordable Care Act in 2015. So a filibuster is just any type of delay or obstruction that any individual senator can engage in. So it's not just the standing up and talking until you pass out, it's the sort of old school filibuster that we used to think about. Now it's really a much broader category. And so the Senate really changed how they handle filibusters. So it used to be you had to hold the floor of the Senate and you talk and talk until you can no longer talk anymore. And that's how you would break a filibuster. You'd wait somebody out. Cloture stops filibuster. If you invoke cloture, you are asking to end the debate and the filibuster and then have a vote. And it requires three-fifths of the Senate to invoke cloture. Sixty votes, which is a ton. The world record filibuster is currently held by Senator Strom Thurmond. He talked for 24 hours and 18 minutes in 1957 to block civil rights legislation. He also apparently took steam baths beforehand to dehydrate himself so that he wouldn't have to pee. But it doesn't really work like that anymore. Now essentially the way it works is essentially you declare your intent that you would filibuster something. And so instead of trying to wait you out, they're going to try to proceed via cloture or just give up entirely or try to convince your mind. Change your mind. And so the cloture vote, you know, getting 60 votes on something is really hard. That's a really tough threshold. And so this distinction where instead of having to talk yourself, horse. You all think I'm late. Well, I'm not late. And I'm going to stay right here and fight for this lost cause. Even if this room gets filled with lies like these. Now that you only have to single that you would filibuster, the costs of filibuster are much, much lower than they used to be for an individual who doesn't like the legislation. And so that's one of the really big changes that we've seen from essentially, you know, the fact that the majority responds to a filibuster by saying, taking the threat as sincere and just saying, all right, we'll either have a vote to try to make you stop or we'll just give up rather than sort of try forcing you to actually hold the floor and have this like long all night marathon. And that's what sort of made the costs of filibuster, much lower for any individual senator who wants a change to some piece of legislation. Let me get this clear. Yeah. You don't need to stand up there anymore to black legislation. You just need to have the 41 people on your side say, yeah, we would black legislation. And nobody has to bother with the steam baths. As things work now in the Senate, that's how you block a bill. So what does this mean for legislation? So it's had a huge impact. I mean, it means in practice now that you have to get, you know, 60% of the Senate on board, you practice have to have bipartisan buying at least some level by partisan buying. And that just means very, very few things can pass through the Senate in its current form. And that's why we've seen, you know, the majority in the Senate take increasing steps to actually weaken the filibuster, right? And we no longer allow filibusters or we lower the cloture vote threshold on judicial nominations, confirmations, that sort of stuff used to also require 60 votes for folks to get confirmed. Now we've lowered that because not enough folks were getting confirmed. The majority felt they couldn't get their way. So the Senate makes their own rules for filibuster and cloture. They do. So theoretically, if the Senate wanted to, they could just get rid of it. They could make cloture always 50 votes. They could. So are we here yet? The vote? Right. I'd almost forgotten. The vote. The Speaker of the House for the President Pro Tem in the Senate, whoever's the presiding officer of the House at that time calls the vote. Sometimes there's a voice vote in the Senate, for example. Each member will come down. No, no name will be called and they'll say, "I" or "N" in the House. They typically vote by electronic device, which means each member of Congress has a it's a little card like a credit card and they stick it into a reader and then they press green for yes, red for no, and then the votes are tallyed that way. Remember when Eleanor said that there are two paths to legislation and we've been going down the real and gnarly one? Yeah. Let's take a little diversion down the bunny hill. Suspending the rules. If the bill is relatively non-controversial, you can do what's called vote under suspension of the rules. If two thirds of the House agrees, you could ignore all the rules and debate in procedures. And in the Senate, you actually have a unanimous consent agreement. So literally every single senator is on board and you just go ahead and pass it and you can just sort of skip all the other rules and the messiness. If people are, if there's no sort of partisan disagreement, we can just do this sort of easy process and lots of legislation passes that way. What kinds of laws get this fast track treatment? Sort of standard everyday things that may not ever make it into a headline in terms of the news, but in which there actually is a fair degree of bipartisan buy-in. So this could be everything from symbolic bill, so renaming a post office, sort of relatively non-controversial things, but even sort of more complicated things. It's tough to even think of examples now because they tend to disagree on everything. But there are spending bills. There are other sorts of things where we do see bipartisan buy-in, where essentially no one objects and they've worked out their disagreements behind closed doors. How often is that? Pretty darn often, in the house, about 60% of bills are passed under suspension. The rules are suspended, the bill is passed, and without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid on the table. After debate and maybe suspension of the rules, in both the House and the Senate, it just requires a simple majority to win a vote. So it can pass, it can fail, there can be a motion to recommit, which means it's got to go back to committee for some work, but if it passes, all it has to do then is just go to the other chamber of Congress for the same exact process. Committee assignment, committee hearings, markup, amendments, reporting it out, debate, vote, because before that bill gets to the desk of the president, we've got just one more committee. If the language of a bill is exactly the same in both the House and the Senate, it goes to the president's desk to be signed, but that very rarely happens. Usually, legislation goes to what's called the conference committee. Senior members of the committees in both the House and the Senate, who worked on that bill, they meet and they talk and they argue, and they decide one final version that both houses are happy with. And that goes to the president. That, that, my old friend, that goes to the president. We're so close. So close, you can just taste it. The last part, presidential actions. The president can sign it and it becomes a law. Oh yeah! The president can also veto it, saying, "I don't like this bill and it doesn't become a law," but the Congress can override a veto with a two-thirds majority vote. Also, the president can just ignore a bill. If it's left on that desk for 10 days, it becomes a law even without the president's signature. However, if the Congress adjurens before those 10 days are up, it does not become a law. This is called a pocket veto. And there you have it. What do you think? It sounds to me like this whole process is mostly about committees. Like, the committee is the most important thing. Yeah, most bills die in committee. Committees determine everything when when it comes to bills.
And Eleanor said something that I hadn't thought about, that people in committees have areas of expertise and they know people who work in the industry, but the influence of committees on bills has recently shifted. You know, congressional committees are really important in the legislative process, but one of the changes we've seen over the last several decades is party leaders increasingly taking power away from the committees and a lot of what the committees are doing is sort of implementing changes that the party leaders want to see in the legislation that have been sort of already agreed upon by the majority. That is my big takeaway for this whole episode, pretty much for the whole series, that nobody can do anything by themselves. In less one party has the presidency and the House and 61 seats in the Senate, there must be compromise and tons of it before we even begin the process. In the 115th Congress, of the proposed 13,556 bills, 443 became law. You want to take a whack at this? I usually save this for a post credits joke. You want to leave me in? What do I say? You got to say, I wonder who that said, little scrap of paper is. I'm just a bill. Yes I'm only a bill and my fate was pretty much determined by the party in power. Well I was written by the staff of a member of Congress and also helped some lobbyists in the Office of Legislative Council, but I was dropped in the hopper and giving a number of-- [laughs] --to the day I am still just a bill. Gosh, Bill, what happens in the committee? Well, let's tell you my young shavr, you see, committees where I'm read and I'm talked about and there's hearings and if I'm super lucky I get reported out. That means I'll be killed or sent to the whole House for debate after the rules committee, of course. But the number of members in the committee who decide what gets reported out is directly proportional to the partisan make by the respective chamber of Congress. So for example, if the House has 235 Democrats and 197 Republicans, the committee is going to have about 22 Democrats and 17 Republicans. But if there's no way I can get a 61 person majority in the Senate, maybe the committee says why even bother? Why even bother talking about it? It's never going to work. But if it is, reported out favorably in the House, it goes to the rules committee who decides the terms of the debate, what amendments can be added, and the speaker of the House is the one who charged the calendar for when Bill's are debated and the bloat around the floor. And it's the Senate, the majority leader in the Senate, charged the calendar. And in the House, an absolute majority of members can sign a discharge tradition to drag it out of committee and head up to the floor for a vote. But that's happened only a handful of times since 1985. There's also the Hastert rule, which I didn't give a chance to talk about in the episode. There's more of an informal rule in the Constitution where the speaker of the House just won't let Bill's come to the floor. There's no half to support a majority party. Even if the bill couldn't be a reticent pass. And we're just getting started. Now we can actually debate and vote on the Senate. So maybe that won't even happen at all. Maybe it's the Senate's rule. Maybe that will be debate. So there's anything that the post office is going to have to bring you here again. The third. Who, Ray Frank, we're so glad you got your post office. That's it for today. That's it for the whole darn starter kit series. We're going to be back in a few weeks. Can't believe it's over. I know. Today's episode was produced by me and it kept the DJ with you, Hannah McCarthy. Thank you. Thank you, Nick. Editorial help from Jackie Fulton, Ben Henry and Samantha Searls. Eric Gajanigas are executive producer and sway back at a Rondack Pac Basket. Maureen McMurray takes steam baths before managers man. Music in this episode by Schoolhouse Rock, Chris Sabrisky, Bezo, Uncle Bibby, Lero Zavira, Kevin McLeod, Mild Wild, Cooper Canal and Blue Dot Sessions. And a very special thanks to Sophia Hordan Wallace, who schooled us on representation in Congress. We do it often. We do not do it often enough. Civic's teachers, APGov, high school, Gov social studies, whatever. If you've used any of our episodes in your class, we really want to hear about it. Drop us a line,
[email protected]. Civics101 is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is a P.P. Production at NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. I get the desk over office, but since it's only nine days left in the session, the president ignores me in the whole thing's over, so we'll just have to do it again next year. That was horrible. So's legislation.
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