Today’s question comes from Gwen who asks:

Who actually writes the bills that the members of congress sponsor and vote for?

This is no simple question and the answer involves many different sorts of people. To get the facts straight, I turned to an ex-staffer, Marci Harris, who just recently worked on the health care legislation in Rep. Pete Stark’s office and had the following to say. (If you want the short answer, there’s a summary at the end.)

Ideas for Bills

There are lots of little bills pending at any time before both the House and Senate, and the ideas behind these small bills come from many sources.  Lots of bills start as news clippings: a Member may read a newspaper article and come in the next morning and tell his staffer to draft a bill to address the issue. And it’s not hard to imagine the origins of bills that would require or .  Others originate from a constituent letter about a particularly compelling issue, or a request from a professional advocate representing a trade association, union, nonprofit, or corporation.

Turning to Staff Lawyers

When a staffer is drafting the bill (either at the Member’s direction, or to pull something together to propose to the Member), they will send a request to the House or Senate’s Office of Legislative Counsel (OLC or “Leg Counsel”) and be assigned a lawyer to work with on turning the idea into legislative language. One of the best analogies I have heard for the who and how of writing laws is a comparison to computer programming.  Lots of people may have an idea of what would be a good software application, but only someone who knows the language of the code can actually write the app in a way that works and can be executed.  So, going with the analogy, the “programmers” in Congress are the lawyers in the OLC, who are completely professional, absolutely unpartian, are around longer than most Members of Congress, and could be making bazillions in the private sector.

OLC’s lawyers turn plain language such as “insurers should not be able to drop you when you are sick” into an amendment to Section X, subsection Y, subpart Z to the Social Security Act, with conforming amendments in the Public Health Services Act, etc. and on and on.  OLC works with all members, regardless of party.   The assignment of a lawyer to a particular issue is based on their specialty – i.e. there are specialists in the IRS Code, specialists in the Social Security Act, etc.  (and “specialist” means they have probably actually drafted significant parts of those laws).

Here’s a , who heads up the health care team for the House’s OLC. He was writing the health care bill then, and he wrote the one that was just signed into law today (with help from other lawyers in House and Senate OLCs).

Reviewing the Draft

Once the staffer has a draft, he or she will probably vet it with trusted experts and organizations that have an interest in the issue.  It is always true that those actually affected by the legislation will troubleshoot its potential positive and adverse effects better than one staffer.  Sometimes those suggestions, especially by professional advocates (i.e. lobbyists), are offered in the form of legislative language or line edits to proposed language.

After the bill has been vetted and the Member agrees to introduce it, a printed copy is signed by the Member and delivered down to the “Hopper” on the House Floor (or similarly for the Senate).  Usually that just means an intern hands it to the clerk minding the door to the Floor, and they get it to the Hopper — in a much less dramatic fashion Legally Blonde II would have you believe.  It is then processed and given a number.

Big Bills and the Christmas Tree

These little bills frequently never come to a vote on their own, but they are important.  Through the co-sponsorship process, and by building support for these small bills through constituent input and endorsements by organizations or businesses, supporters of these bills demonstrate to Leadership that the idea has merit and should be considered for inclusion in a larger package.  Those larger packages are the bills that have nicknames and get all the attention – The Health Care Bill, The Climate Change Bill, The Stimulus Package.  In fact, staffers often refer to the end-of-the year spending bill as a “Christmas Tree” with lots of “ornaments” in the form of these smaller bills with large contingencies of support attached to make the bill more attractive.

The chairmen and subcommittee chairmen of committees of jurisdiction lead the process of drafting the large bills.  Usually for a large bill, the committee will dedicate days or weeks or months of hearings to gathering information about the topic, to hear different perspectives and to educate the members and staff. During these hearings, Members will raise concerns or express interest in certain policies, both to make their views public and to indicate to the chairman and staff what they would like to see in a bill.  Before drafting begins, there will likely be many meetings among staff and Members to discuss priorities, and attempt to reach consensus on an approach, within the committee, or at least within the majority members of the committee.

The staff then works on a format based on the input from committee members, directed by the Chairman.  Often this will include “picking up” smaller bills that have been introduced by committee members and including them in the legislation.  OLC then turns this format into legislative language and the vetting process goes forward. The draft language will likely go through many iterations, with many edits.  Edits to the document are done by OLC, usually only at the direction of the committee staffer that is in charge of that particular section.  When the bill is ready, it is treated just like the smaller bills, it is printed, signed, delivered to the Hopper, and given a number.

Summary

So here’s a summary of what Marci wrote: If you want to know who actually puts pen to paper, it’s nonpartisan staff lawyers who work for Congress who know the exiting law they are affecting inside out. They do that under the direction of office staff for Members of Congress and congressional committees, who vet the bill with outside experts and advocates. Sometimes those advocates (i.e. lobbyists) propose changes in the form of legislative language. But did they write the bill? Probably not.

Mogy asks:

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, , which President Obama pocket-vetoed. It was his first veto, but it was also .

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, , 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.

Today’s ques­tion comes from Erika M:

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

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.

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.)

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.

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 ?

alice in wonderland hd

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

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.

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 .) 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

. 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.

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.

Thanks for the question, Sara.

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?

Read it all..

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

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 (

):

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:

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..