How a Bill Becomes a Law

Each house of Congress is engaged in making laws, and each may initiate legislation. A law first begins as a ‘bill’. Once a bill is introduced, it is sent to the appropriate committee. Each House of Congress has committees which specialize in a particular area of legislation, such as foreign affairs, defense, banking and agriculture. When a bill is in committee, members study it and then send it to the senate or House chamber where it was first introduced. After a debate, the bill is voted on. If it passes, it is sent to the other House where it goes through a similar process.

The Senate may reject a bill proposed in the House of Representatives or add amendments. If that happens, a ‘conference committee’ (made up of members from both houses) tries to work out a compromise. If both sides agree on the new version, the bill is sent to the president for his signature. At this point, the bill becomes a law. If the President refuses to sign it, his’ veto’ can be overridden by a two thirds majority in both Houses. All treaties, and all the President’s appointments to high offices, are subject to the Senate’s approval.

One of the most important characteristics of the two Houses of Congress is that they work through committees of their own members. The House has about 20 permanent committees, roughly corresponding with the main branches of government, and the Senate has about 16. Each senator is a member of one or two committees. All committees give seats to the parties in proportion to their strength in the House or the Senate. The main function of a committee is to inquire into each bill that is proposed and to recommend whether the bill be accepted or not, and also to decide whether to recommend changes in its text before it goes to the main House for discussion. But the committees have developed much wide functions than this. Nowadays they undertake inquiries into all sorts of matters and they also examine the working of the administrative machinery under the President.

The chairman of each committee has enormous influence over the way the committee works. In particular the chairman is mainly in control of the committee’s business.

A committee of one of the Houses of Congress assumes that before taking a decision on some bill it ought to make thorough inquiries into the background and the desirability of the new proposal. So it proceeds to discover information, not only through the individual efforts of some members, but also through ‘hearings’, at which people who are in a position to give relevant advice appear before the committee to make statements and to answer questions.

When a committee decides to hold hearings on a bill or other questions it may very often set up a sub-committee for the purpose. The sub-committee then holds a series of sessions, at which it receives written statements from people who wish to argue for a or against a new policy, and some of these people have an opportunity of attending the sittings of the subcommittee to state their arguments and to be questioned by committee members.

If a committee receives a bill which the chairman doesn’t like, he may delay the hearings or fill-up the subcommittee with members who agree with him, so that the discussion with the outside people who come in may be influenced by the attitude of the members of the sub-committee. These hearings are often by no means friendly in atmosphere.

When the hearings are completed the committee goes into executive session to decide on the disposal of the bill, and this stage involves looking closely at the text and possibly amending it. When the committee has completed its work on a bill it reports it back to its House. In the House of Representatives the bill has to take its place along with dozens of others. The arrangement of the business of the House of Representatives is controlled by another committee called the Rule Committee. If a majority of the Rule Committee doesn’t want a bill to pass, it can fail to recommend that bill for discussion at all. In that case, those who wish to have the bill discussed in the House have to pass a petition discharging the Committee from consideration of the bill, and that is very difficult to achieve: the petition must be signed by the absolute majority, and congressmen don’t like to incur the displeasure of the Committee’s powerful chairman.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-20