Schoolhouse Rock Left Out the Rules Committee, and That Is Where Bills Move

We all remember the little bill. He sits on the Capitol steps, a rolled-up piece of paper with a hopeful face, and he sings about how he becomes a law. A committee votes. The House votes. The Senate votes. The President signs. Roll credits. It is a lovely three minutes and it has taught two generations of Americans the one thing a bill never does, which is travel in a straight line.

Folks, I love the cartoon. I also notice that in the cartoon the bill never meets the Rules Committee, never gets a motion to suspend the rules, never waits on a unanimous consent agreement and never gets told that part of him is "extraneous" and has to be cut. If real legislation had to sing about its journey, the song would run to forty minutes and end in a point of order. So let us do what the cartoon did not: walk a bill through every gate it actually passes, in order, and then talk about where an ordinary citizen's phone call matters.

The two requirements the Constitution actually imposes

Start with the part the cartoon got right, because it is the part that is written down. Article I, Section 7, Clause 2 says: "Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States."

Two requirements live in that sentence. The first is bicameralism: the House and the Senate must both pass the same bill, in the same form. The second is presentment: the bill must go to the President, who may sign it, or return it with objections, in which case two thirds of each chamber can override him. The Supreme Court treated these as non-negotiable in INS v. Chadha in 1983, striking down a "legislative veto" because it let one House alter legal rights without passing through both chambers and the President. We cover that case in INS v. Chadha Killed the Legislative Veto and Left Congress Fewer Tools.

Everything else, and I do mean everything, is rules the chambers wrote for themselves under Article I, Section 5: "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings." That is why the House and Senate work so differently, and why the real action is in rules the cartoon never mentions.

Step one, committee, where most bills die

A bill is introduced and referred to a committee. Most never leave. Thousands of bills are introduced in a typical Congress and only a few hundred become law, and committees are the filter. The chairman decides what gets a hearing and a markup, and a bill that does not get a markup is dead unless a majority of the House signs a discharge petition, which we explain in 218 Signatures, How a Discharge Petition Pries a Bill Loose From the Speaker.

That is already a major difference from the cartoon, in which the committee votes yes and everyone smiles. In life the committee is a gate, and the person holding the key is the chairman.

Step two, the House Rules Committee

If a bill passes committee in the House, it goes onto a calendar, and then comes the least-known powerful body in the country: the Rules Committee. Its job is to write a special rule, a resolution that sets the terms under which the full House will debate and amend a particular bill. The House must first adopt that resolution by a majority vote before it can take up the bill.

Special rules come in a few flavors, and the difference decides who gets to influence the outcome.

• An open rule allows any member to offer any germane amendment, subject to the time available. It is the most democratic and the rarest in modern practice.
• A structured rule limits which amendments may be offered, usually those that the Rules Committee has pre-approved. This is the commonest kind on big bills.
• A closed rule allows no amendments at all. The House votes the bill up or down.

Now here is the thing nobody in the coverage ever explains. A vote on a special rule is a vote on the process, and the majority party almost always wins it. The Rules Committee is stacked in favor of the majority by a wide margin, far more than the party's share of the House, which is why it is often called an arm of the Speaker's office. If you control the Rules Committee, you control what the House can say about a bill. A member who loses on the rule vote loses the fight before the bill is ever debated.

That is also why a Speaker's grip on the Rules Committee is such a serious thing, and why, when a few majority members vote against a rule, newspapers treat it as a political earthquake. Defeating a rule is the House's way of telling the leadership that the whole plan is in trouble.

Step three, suspension of the rules, the express lane

The House has a second path that skips the Rules Committee entirely. Under House Rule XV, the Speaker may recognize a member to move to suspend the rules and pass a bill. Debate is limited to 40 minutes, no amendments are allowed, and the bill passes only if two thirds of the members present and voting say yes.

The two-thirds requirement makes suspension the express lane for bills that almost everyone supports: post office namings, noncontroversial technical fixes and bipartisan measures. Because it takes a supermajority, a bill that is controversial will fail on suspension, and then it is back to the Rules Committee for a special rule. There is a quiet lesson in the arithmetic. Suspension turns the House's ordinary majority rule into a two-thirds rule, and it keeps the calendar from clogging with items nobody opposes.

Step four, the Senate, where unanimity is the default

Cross the Capitol and the architecture changes. The Senate has no Rules Committee with that kind of power over debate. It runs, to an extraordinary degree, on unanimous consent. When the Senate wants to take up a bill, agree on a list of amendments and set a time for a vote, the majority leader proposes a unanimous consent agreement. If a single senator objects, the agreement fails.

That is why a single senator can slow a Senate, and why the leader spends so much time negotiating. It is also why, if you want to understand the Senate, you must stop thinking of it as a smaller House. It is a body that holds as a first principle that every member counts.

Step five, cloture and the 60-vote threshold

When unanimous consent fails, the Senate turns to cloture, the procedure that ends debate. Under Senate Rule XXII, a cloture motion requires the votes of three fifths of the senators duly chosen and sworn, which is 60 when the Senate is full. After cloture passes, there are up to 30 more hours of consideration before a final vote.

A minority of 41 senators can therefore block a bill by denying cloture. That is the modern filibuster, and it is the Senate's best-known device. For nominations, the Senate changed its practice in 2013 and again in 2017 so that a simple majority is enough to end debate, but the 60-vote threshold still applies to most legislation. For a closer look at why a minority values that threshold, read The Filibuster After the Midterm, Why Sixty Votes Now Protect the Outnumbered, and for the satirical opposite, If a Majority Could Never Be Slowed, a Satirical Tour of the 51-Vote Republic.

Step six, reconciliation, the workaround

Because 60 votes is hard to find, Congress has built a bypass. The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 created reconciliation, a process for passing certain budget-related bills, covering spending and revenue, with debate limited to 20 hours in the Senate and no filibuster. A simple majority carries it.

But reconciliation has a gatekeeper, and she is not a person but a rule. The Byrd rule, named for Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia and now part of the Budget Act, forbids provisions in a reconciliation bill that are "extraneous," meaning they have no budgetary effect or that effect is merely incidental to a policy change. The Senate parliamentarian advises the presiding officer on which provisions break the rule. A provision that violates it can be struck unless 60 senators vote to waive.

It produces some of the funniest scenes in American government, if you have a taste for dry comedy. A roomful of the most powerful people on earth gather to argue about whether a sentence is "merely incidental," and a staffer you have never heard of tells them. The cartoon bill never has to face the parliamentarian, but the real one does.

Step seven, the conference or the ping-pong

The House and the Senate must pass the same text. When they pass different versions, there are two ways to reconcile them.

1. A conference committee: members from both chambers meet, negotiate a single text and send it back to each chamber for an up-or-down vote with no further amendments.
2. Ping-pong: each chamber amends the other's version and sends it back until they agree. It is more informal, and it is now the more common route on major legislation.

Either way, the bill has to pass both chambers in identical form, and then it goes to the President. If you recall the cartoon, this is where the bill gets signed. In the real world there is one more step: the President has ten days, Sundays excepted, to sign or veto, and if he does nothing while Congress is in session, the bill becomes law without his signature.

Why the real process matters, an argument in four numbered points

I do not tell this story to make Congress sound hopelessly complicated, although it is. I tell it because the structure is an argument, and the argument is worth making.

1. Friction is a feature. The Founders designed a system to make laws hard to pass. In Federalist No. 73 Hamilton defended the presidential veto as one of the institutions "calculated to restrain the excess of law-making." The multiple gates in Congress extend that thinking: a law should survive a lot of scrutiny before it binds a free people.
2. The gates are where power sits. A rule that decides who may offer an amendment, a vote threshold that decides whether a minority can block, and a parliamentarian who decides what counts as budgetary: these are real power, and they are held by people most voters cannot name. A citizen who understands the gates can aim at the right target.
3. Each gate has an owner. The Speaker and the Rules Committee control the House's agenda, the majority leader and the minority's objections control the Senate's, and committee chairs control the front end of both. If you want a bill to move, you need to know whose desk it is sitting on.
4. Secrecy is the enemy of accountability. A process nobody can follow lets everyone say the vote was someone else's fault. A public that can follow it can tell who blocked what.

The steelman, and an answer

The best case for the complicated system, from its defenders, is that every gate is there for a reason, and that each reflects a tradeoff between speed and deliberation. Special rules let a majority govern. Suspension saves time. Unanimous consent keeps the Senate courteous and fast. Cloture protects the minority. Reconciliation lets a majority pass a budget. Remove any gate and you lose something.

I agree with a great deal of that, and I would not scrap the system. But the defenders owe the public one thing in return: an honest accounting of who holds each key. Too often a gate that was built to protect deliberation is used to protect a leader from a vote. A suspension calendar that lets a Speaker avoid recorded votes on controversial amendments is not deliberation, it is dodge ball. The test of every gate is whether it makes members answer to voters or helps them hide.

Where a citizen's call matters most

So, practically, where does a phone call count? Here are the places, in order of how often they decide a fight.

• Before the committee markup. A chairman deciding whether to hold a hearing, and members deciding how to vote at markup, are the most responsive people in the process. A call to a member of the committee, especially one from the district, is worth more here than anywhere later.
• Before the rule vote in the House. When a special rule comes to the floor, a handful of members in the majority sometimes hold the margin. A call to your representative on that vote is a call about the process, which is where the amendment fights are won or lost.
• Before cloture in the Senate. The cloture vote is the clearest roll call in the Senate, and a senator on the fence is often reading his mail.
• Before the final vote, when members are most aware of the headlines.

To find the people who represent you, use the representative lookup, and to follow votes after the fact, the scorecard records how members voted. For a wider look at the numbers behind these votes, The Numbers That Run Congress, From 218 to 60 to 290 to 38 and Back lays out the thresholds in one place.

The cartoon bill had a good heart. The real one needs a few more friends, and some of them have to be willing to read the rules.

The case in brief

1. The Constitution requires only two things of a bill: passage by both the House and the Senate, and presentment to the President under Article I, Section 7; everything else is rules each chamber writes for itself.
2. In the House, the Rules Committee writes a special rule, open, structured or closed, that sets the terms of debate, and suspension of the rules lets two thirds pass noncontroversial bills in 40 minutes without amendments.
3. In the Senate, unanimous consent governs, cloture needs 60 votes, and reconciliation lets a majority pass budget bills under the 1974 Budget Act, policed by the Byrd rule.
4. The two chambers must pass identical text, by conference or ping-pong, before the President acts.
5. Each gate has an owner, and a citizen who knows the owner can call at the moment the call counts.

What you can do: pick one bill you care about on Congress.gov, find which committee holds it, and call a member of that committee before the markup.