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...
by jpitney | Aug 30, 2021 | Congress, House of Representatives, Infrastruture
At The Hill, Don Wolfensberger writes about floor action on the infrastructure bill: How do you tell your constituents you opposed funding for repairing the crumbling roads and bridges in their district? Just as lawyers are advised to either argue the facts or law and...
by jpitney | May 1, 2021 | Congress, House of Representatives
At LegBranch.org, Scott Meinke notes that the House Rules Committee has been regularly issuing rules that combine provisions for considering two or more measures in a single resolution. These multiple-measures rules made up about a quarter of the rules issued in the...
by jpitney | Apr 25, 2021 | Congress, House of Representatives
Donald Wolfensberger at The Hill: As a denizen of the minority party during my first 26 years as a staffer in the House, I came to be quite an expert on majority party moves to counter minority party provocations. At one point, I even coined a bastardization of...
