by jpitney | Oct 17, 2025 | Budget, Congress
Kevin Kosar: Sometimes Congress does not bother to adopt a budget resolution. Legislators rarely enact individual spending bills. Instead, they ball them up into omnibus spending packages or pass continuing resolutions. Reconciliation has devolved into a vehicle for...
by jpitney | Jan 6, 2025 | Congress, Senate
Andrew Desiderio at Punchbowl News: Senate Majority Leader John Thune indicated to us that he’d oppose efforts to overrule the Senate’s parliamentarian if certain GOP border security and tax provisions are ruled inconsistent with budget reconciliation rules. In a...
by jpitney | Dec 21, 2024 | Congress, Journalism, Journalists, Regulation, State Government
Nik Usher at Nieman Lab: Most people find talk of clotures, filibusters, committee votes, bill reconciliation, the legislative calendar, and beyond absolutely boring. If civic-affairs news is the broccoli of American journalism, then coverage of legislative procedure...
by jpitney | Oct 23, 2021 | Congress
Kevin Kosar at The Hill: So why is the legislative procedure so complex and opaque? Largely, it is the product of the aggregation of new rules and precedents year after year. The most recent copy of the House’s guide to legislative procedure is more than 1,000 pages...
by jpitney | Oct 2, 2021 | Congress, Deliberation, House of Representatives
Don Wolfensberger at The Hill: By attempting to short-circuit and compress committee and floor workloads, Congress is losing both its deliberative capacity and its ability to provide a proper check on the executive branch. The longer-term danger is that such truncated...
