How to Kill a Bill in the U.S.
In the American political system, it is much easier to kill a proposed bill than it is to have one passed. Even though thousands of bills are introduced in congress each year, a very tiny fraction actually become law. It is unfortunate that majority of the thousands of bills that are sacrificed at the altar of America politics are public bills that mean a lot of good for the American people. Think of such bills as Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), Creating American Jobs and Ending Offshoring Act, to name but a few.
But before we look at the various ways in which a bill can be killed in the US politics, it is important to look at the long ‘journey’ that a bill has to travel and the many formal hurdles it would need to jump for it to become law in The United States of America. This understanding is important because it is the only way someone can suggest reasonable changes that would allow more bills to see the light of day (O’Connor, 73).
First, an idea hatches into a bill. The bill gets a representative who sponsors it. Next, the bill gets assigned to a committee that studies it and then releases it to await the Congress to vote on, debate or amend it. In case the bill passes a simple majority Congress vote (218 of 435), then it goes to the Senate where another committee will study and release it to the senate for yet another debate and vote. If it manages a simple senate majority vote (51 of 100), the bill is presented to a combined committee of both the Senate and the House (Conference Committee) where any differences between the Senate version and the House version of the bill are ironed out. The product bill is then taken back to both the Senate and the House to get a final approval before it is printed (enrolled) and presented to the president. In a maximum ten days, the president can either sign the enrolled bill into law or veto it.
In a nutshell, the process of passing a bill into law is slow and tedious, with stages that appear to be clearly intended to ensure that as few as possible bills go all the way to become law. One may then ask whether the process is by default or design. The answer is that it is by design. Those who framed the constitution assumed that a slow moving legislative procedure would be less likely to encroach on the rights and liberties of the citizens. Regrettably, the process is doing more harm than good to the same people it intended to protect.
So, how is a bill killed? There are seven ways to kill a proposed bill. One way is by a president’s veto. The second is whereby the bill is presented to the president with less than ten days left within which to sign it. When that term expires, the bill automatically dies. This is called the pocket veto. The third way is by defeating the bill through the vote in either the Senate or the House.
Committees to which a bill goes for review may decide not to report the existence of such a bill to the Congress and thus the bill dies a natural death. Another way to kill a bill is where the Majority Leader of Senate fails to set a date for the bill to be debated and the bill dies off. The House Rules Committee, after receiving a report on a bill from a committee, is supposed to take the bill off the calendar and also set the rules for debating it. If this doesn’t happen, the bill dies. Unlike the House, the Senate lacks rules for debating a bill. Therefore, they can talk endlessly on a bill thus preventing a vote on the bill to take place. This mode of killing a bill is called filibuster.
Work Cited
O’Connor,Karen, Sabato Larry J., and Yanus Alexander B. Essentials of American Government: Roots and Reforms. Pearson Longman Publishing, 2014.
