Mogy asks:

How many bills have not been signed into law after passage in the House and the Senate?

Instead of just giving a number, let me break down the state of every bill proposed in Congress in 2009. As you may know, Congress operates on two-year cycles and bills don’t carry oveer from cycle to cycle. 2009 was the first year in the “111th Congress” cycle.

Enacted Laws: 123 bills have been enacted in this cycle by being passed by both houses of Congress and then being signed by the president. (This includes some joint resolutions but I’m just calling them bills on this count.)

Passed Both Chambers: 21 bills have passed both chambers but haven’t become law. There are a few reasons this can happen. In some cases, the House and Senate have passed different versions of the same bill and need to confer to produce a single final bill. In a handful of over cases, the House and Senate adjourned shortly after passing the bill, and so they have not gotten around to formally sending the bill to the President. Finally, we have the bill, H.J.Res. 64, which President Obama pocket-vetoed. It was his first veto, but it was also mostly a formality.

Passed One Chamber: 318 bills have passed either the House or Senate but not the other, and so are waiting for the second house of Congress to pick it up.

Failed: One legislative item, S.J.Res. 5, failed on its vote on passage in its originating chamber. This is relatively unusual because leadership avoids votes on bills they believe will not pass.

Failed Suspension Vote: 4 bills were voted on and failed in the House under what’s called “suspension of the rules” which is a technical term for when they try to move noncontroversial legislation forward under a two-thirds vote. Bills that fail this way can be tried again under a simple majority vote later on.

Introduced: 6,585 bills have been introduced and are awaiting a committee recommendation before being considered by the House or Senate as a whole.

And that’s every bill.

Today’s question comes from Erika M:

I see yea, nay, no, aye as the way congressmen voted.  What does aye mean?

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Ah parliamentary procedure. There’s no meaningful difference between Yea and Aye, and Nay and No. They both mean “I vote in favor” or “I vote against”. The difference is just a matter of procedure. The Constitution actually requires “Yea” and “Nay” for votes on the passage of bills (Article I Section 7), and so the House and Senate both do that for those particular votes.

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In fact, the Senate uses Yea and Nay for all votes. Good for them for keeping things simple. It’s another story for the House.

There are two peculiarities of the House that make the answer to the question not so simple. First, they use Aye and No for all voice votes, where congressmen just shout out their vote and the chair judges who won just by listening. (Anyone can subsequently demand that the votes be recorded individually, in which case a recorded vote is used. In the Senate, voice votes use Yea and Nay.)

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The second peculiarity of the House is that it operates in two modes of procedure, and that determines which kind of vote is used for recorded votes not on the passage of bills (because those are always Yea and Nay). These final types of votes could be for amendments, motions, etc. The first mode is normal House floor debate, which uses Yea and Nay for recorded votes, so you will see Aye and No for voice votes but Yea and Nay for recorded votes. Yea and Nay are reserved for this mode of debate only. The second mode is when the House operates as if it were a committee made up of everyone, called “The Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union,” and in this mode Aye and No are used for recorded votes as well as voice votes.

Some more details are in House Rules, if you want to pour through the details. It’s in Rules of the House, Rule XX, and House Practice in the section Voting.

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Visitor WB asks:

I understand there are different Bills passed by congress regularly. Some with “H.R.”, “S”, H. Res” and other variations. My questions is this: What are the types of Bills and what does each designations stand for? Where is each Bill valid? Who is subject to that specific Bill? Read it all..

Sara from Kentucky asks:

I don’t know if I am hearing accurate information. Some of us want bill numbers listed in newspapers so we can look them up. “America’s Healthy Future Act”  has no number and Baucus’s office says that it will not receive a number until it goes to the Senate Floor. It is not on GovTrack. Would it be on Thomas?

HR 676 has never gone to the House floor, yet it has a number.  Why is this?

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The issue that Sara raises is an important one for government transparency: where does the legislative process begin? the first step in the parliamentary procedure for a bill to become law is for the sponsor of the bill in the House or Senate to submit the bill formally to the clerk of the chamber. At that point, the clerk assigns it a number. Then the bill gets assigned (”referred”) to committees which begin the deliberations for the bill, and eventually, if it is lucky, it may come to the full chamber for a vote.

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The tricky thing for us on the outside is that there’s no stopping congress from deliberating on an idea before it is submitted to the clerk and officially becomes a bill under consideration. And if it’s not an official bill, it’s not on the government website THOMAS or on GovTrack. This isn’t something you can prevent. There will always be deliberations outside of the official way things work. And I think that’s fine. It does make things difficult to follow, though.

That’s what happened with the stimulus bills a year ago. There were a number of drafts and revisions all before the bill actually became an actual bill. And that’s what’s happening in the Senate with drafting its health care bill. (The House drafted H.R. 3200.) Until the bill gets formally submitted, it’s not “in the system”. You can only get a draft — an essentially unofficial bill — from the congressman’s or committee’s website that is working on it, if they care to share.

The Senate Committee on Finance posted a PDF of the latest draft

. It’s called a Chairman’s Mark because it is the draft bill with the markups (i.e. revisions) that the chair of the committee (Max Baucus) wants to push forward. It’s what the committee voted on, and subsequently passed. I expect this to be submitted to the Senate clerk and get a bill number soon.

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I would like GovTrack to start collecting draft bills where we can find them, but I haven’t had the time yet to build the infrastructure on the site for it yet.

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Thanks for the question, Sara.

Legends of the Fall dvdrip Q:”What happens to an approved Senate bill with respect to an identical House bill? If the House version is defeated, does the bill end?”

This is a great legislative process question. Let me rephrase it: What are companion bills and how do they work?

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Read it all..

Here’s another legislative process Q&A post. We tackle two questions in this post. Here’s the first:

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Dante’s Peak divx Does one know who writes a bill? Is writing a bill considered different than being the Sponsor of the bill?

Read it all..

Using the new Q&A tool, a visitor asked (here

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What does “Ordered to be reported with an amendment in the nature of a substitute favorably” mean?

GovTrack tries to answer. Read on… Read it all..

A visitor to this site asked me:

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Q: How can I find out what a particular representative voted upon and then went back to change his/her vote? I understand that this is done very often so that the hometown folks think that he/she voted one way, but that they go back and change the actual vote recorded later.

Was it really true that Members of Congress can change their votes? Read it all..