how a bill becomes a law...
December 16, 2022 6:19 PM Subscribe
I know the basic steps, but want to know the average amount of time it takes, from when a bill is drafted to when it goes to a congressional floor debate and vote in the U.S. I'm curious about both state level and federal bills.
How long does it typically take for bills to be reviewed by committees and subcommittees and then move forward (or get killed)? Weeks, months, years? Is there a "season" or month when this process usually happens (like how SCOTUS follows a calendar guiding when they release decisions)?
I'm currently following a federal bill proposed by a U.S. Senator and one sponsored by a state representative. (Both will impact me personally and I want to make sure I get all updates in real time, watch public hearings, etc). It appears the state bill has languishing with no action taken for 6 months now, which is what prompted this question.
How long does it typically take for bills to be reviewed by committees and subcommittees and then move forward (or get killed)? Weeks, months, years? Is there a "season" or month when this process usually happens (like how SCOTUS follows a calendar guiding when they release decisions)?
I'm currently following a federal bill proposed by a U.S. Senator and one sponsored by a state representative. (Both will impact me personally and I want to make sure I get all updates in real time, watch public hearings, etc). It appears the state bill has languishing with no action taken for 6 months now, which is what prompted this question.
Possibly you already know this, but bills have to be introduced in the same Congress they're voted on, which means sometimes the same bill (either exactly, or effectively the same, or a later iteration) is introduced multiple times. Here in Colorado, it's actually written into the state constitution that every bill that's introduced into the session has to have a public hearing and vote, which leads to the long standing tradition of the party in power in the state house and senate designating one committee as the "Kill Committee," aka the place where certain pieces of legislation are sent to die a quiet, not-voted-on-by-the-entire-legislative-body death. Possibly your state legislature has the same kind of thing going on. Or perhaps not! State representatives and their staff (if they have them) tend to be very accessible, so I'd recommend contacting the rep who introduced the state bill to ask, and also if that's not your rep, contacting the state legislators who represent you to let them know it's an issue that affects you personally and that you want to know if/when it's coming for a committee and/or floor vote.
posted by deludingmyself at 8:58 PM on December 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by deludingmyself at 8:58 PM on December 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Congress “resets” every 2 years. Any pending bills will die on January 3, 2023 when the 117th Congress ends and the 118th begins. Numerous bills will be immediately reintroduced, of course, in many cases just as they were two years ago, and two years before that, and…
It’s true that very few bills are enacted, but more get enacted than a simple count of bills introduced and bills enacted might suggest. Many bills are introduced and appear to stall out as standalone bills but actually get enacted as “hitchhikers” by being added into a larger bill, often “must pass” legislation such as a major budget bill.
There is a lot of seasonality to Congress. A ton of legislation is introduced at the beginning of a Congress, virtually nothing happens in August because of the recess, etc. The House and Senate calendars can give you a sense of it.
The last time I did the math on this, of the bills that progress in Congress, most take 109 days from introduction to being reported out of a committee, then 31 days from being reported to a floor vote, then 127 days from passing in one chamber to passing in the other. Specifically those are the 75th percentile numbers at each stage.
State legislatures vary a lot, with many not being in session for the whole year. It would be helpful to know what bills you are looking at specifically.
posted by jedicus at 9:11 PM on December 16, 2022 [7 favorites]
It’s true that very few bills are enacted, but more get enacted than a simple count of bills introduced and bills enacted might suggest. Many bills are introduced and appear to stall out as standalone bills but actually get enacted as “hitchhikers” by being added into a larger bill, often “must pass” legislation such as a major budget bill.
There is a lot of seasonality to Congress. A ton of legislation is introduced at the beginning of a Congress, virtually nothing happens in August because of the recess, etc. The House and Senate calendars can give you a sense of it.
The last time I did the math on this, of the bills that progress in Congress, most take 109 days from introduction to being reported out of a committee, then 31 days from being reported to a floor vote, then 127 days from passing in one chamber to passing in the other. Specifically those are the 75th percentile numbers at each stage.
State legislatures vary a lot, with many not being in session for the whole year. It would be helpful to know what bills you are looking at specifically.
posted by jedicus at 9:11 PM on December 16, 2022 [7 favorites]
There are several sites that track bills moving through legislatures, both national and state, here's one
Texas lege process is described here in brief and here in more detail but the main points, imo, are that the Texas lege only meets every other year and then only for 140 days from early Jan to end of May. The last days are hectic and I used to find it somewhat amusing before I realized how important issues were not being dealt with in transparency.
Bills can be pre-submitted as early as Nov the year prior (so Nov 2022 for the upcoming session of Jan 10-May 29, 2023) and they darn well better be because it's rare for all bills submitted to make it onto the calendar, then through hearings in both houses, reconciliation, etc. Much work is done behind the scenes by lobbyists and staffers in order for sessions to get anything accomplished at all, so often what is seen publically is somewhat secondary to what is happening elsewhere.
Governor can call special sessions that can last up to 30 days but must specify the topic to be considered.
posted by beaning at 9:53 PM on December 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
Texas lege process is described here in brief and here in more detail but the main points, imo, are that the Texas lege only meets every other year and then only for 140 days from early Jan to end of May. The last days are hectic and I used to find it somewhat amusing before I realized how important issues were not being dealt with in transparency.
Bills can be pre-submitted as early as Nov the year prior (so Nov 2022 for the upcoming session of Jan 10-May 29, 2023) and they darn well better be because it's rare for all bills submitted to make it onto the calendar, then through hearings in both houses, reconciliation, etc. Much work is done behind the scenes by lobbyists and staffers in order for sessions to get anything accomplished at all, so often what is seen publically is somewhat secondary to what is happening elsewhere.
Governor can call special sessions that can last up to 30 days but must specify the topic to be considered.
posted by beaning at 9:53 PM on December 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
I would check your state legislature's website to see if they have something like Washington's Bill Tracker, you can sign up to get email alerts about the status of legislation - when it's introduced, hearings, votes, etc.
Gov Track does something similar at the Federal level.
posted by brookeb at 9:55 PM on December 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
Gov Track does something similar at the Federal level.
posted by brookeb at 9:55 PM on December 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
A lot of bills are introduced with no particular intention of them becoming law. Sometimes its part of a long term effort to work something out, sometimes its a statement, sometimes just an attempt to appease a constituency.
Such bills go to die in committee, where they can vanish without anyone taking a stand on them. Supposedly Oklahoma once had a "Deep Sea Navigation Committee" which never met but existed solely to bury stuff with no hassle. If this was really true it appears to have long since passed away; I guess in the internet era you can't be quite so blatant about burying stuff.
The federal budget and appropriations cycle runs from about February to September, and is (on average) going to be the largest fast moving set of bills in Congress. An excellent one to get your amendments attached too, if you actually want something to become law.
posted by mark k at 11:07 PM on December 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
Such bills go to die in committee, where they can vanish without anyone taking a stand on them. Supposedly Oklahoma once had a "Deep Sea Navigation Committee" which never met but existed solely to bury stuff with no hassle. If this was really true it appears to have long since passed away; I guess in the internet era you can't be quite so blatant about burying stuff.
The federal budget and appropriations cycle runs from about February to September, and is (on average) going to be the largest fast moving set of bills in Congress. An excellent one to get your amendments attached too, if you actually want something to become law.
posted by mark k at 11:07 PM on December 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
I work for and with various advocacy organizations who work to have legislation passed, and the rule of thumb we use is about 6 years from conception to passage. This is for something that is #1. Actually passed eventually and #2. Fairly noncontroversial.
What happens is, you have an idea for a bill and you have developed (or work to develop) a constituency for it. So that part can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few decades.
Then you find a sponsor for your bill, ideally the right sponsor - ie, the right party, someone who is in the "in" group with leadership, maybe a bipartisan pair of sponsors, etc.
They introduce the bill and then you can work on getting cosponsors for it. If it is pretty noncontroversial then you might be able to get a lot of supporting legislators to sign on, ideally from both parties, and that helps a lot. (You will get a few more chances at this as it moves along over the years, so you might only get a few cosponsors the first time around but if all goes well you might get more in future years.)
Then, if your sponsor has the right connections and pull, you get a hearing on the bill. This might happen the first year it is introduced or it might take a few tries.
At the hearing you are going to find out everything wrong with your bill. The opponents will come out of the woodwork. They will attack it, or parts of it. Lots of bills die at this point, when it becomes obvious that the opposition is substantial and no reasonable compromises will be possible.
But if you are lucky, you encounter opposition that has some concrete demands and issues, and you work with them and figure out compromise language for the bill that will keep them happy (enough).
So that all might take a year or maybe two or three. Often in our state legislature, new bills or things the Committee Chair doesn't really put his weight behind have a hard time getting a committee hearing early on in session. So even if it goes well (which it usually doesn't), the hearing often happens too late in session for the bill to have a realistic chance of moving forward that year. But you take the changes and support you have found for the bill this year, and the sponsor talks to the committee chair and tries to get and agreement to get going earlier next year now that an acceptable form of the bill has been reached.
Now i haven't even mentioned that you probably moved your bill forward as described above, in only one chamber. Often at our state level (and in Congress, too) that is the House because it has far more members, far more committees, and generally far more time to consider far more bills.
So as you are moving the bill forward with sponsors in (say) the House, you are also looking for sponsors in the Senate. But usually that is a quite a bit harder and so you don't make much headway. But now that the bill has developed some support in the House and looks like it has some promise to move forward, now maybe you can find more support in the Senate. Also maybe your bill sponsor or other supporters have some good relationships in the Senate so they can get a friend to carry the bill, or maybe do some horse trading or arm twisting to get a motivated sponsor there.
Point is, this kind of jockeying often takes a few years (!) or even more to work out. Maybe the bill gets all the way through the House a time or two, then it's sent to the Senate and they find a Senator to carry it there, but by the time it has worked its way all the way through the House process it is coming to the Senate pretty late in the session and so they have a hearing (and here maybe you find out all the things that people object to NOW that it looks like the bill has an actual chance to pass, so maybe more revisions or updates or compromises must be made). But after a try or two of this (which, again, can mean 1-3 years more), maybe your Senate sponsor starts to really like the bill and sees that it has a good chance to actually pass.
So the following year your Senate sponsor also introduces this (now pretty battle-tested) version of the bill early on and gets and early Senate hearing, and since the bill now has most all the kinks worked out and committee members supporting it - they have now had hearings on it several times - and it passes out of committee early in session.
Your House sponsor(s) also get an early hearing and early pass out of session.
So now it is moving forward with a chance of actually getting through the calendar and passing BOTH houses at a reasonable clip.
(Now you're going to say - you can't just pass a bill in the House and another bill with the same language in the Senate and then it's passed! True, you can't. So why do you do this?
Well, first off this is as giant horse race with a very tight deadline and only like 1% of the horse ever pass the finish line. So now you have TWO horses in the race which gives you a double chance of getting at least one of them over the finish line.
Also, whichever bill has manages to move along first, partly due to good planning and partly due to good luck, you can jump on that one with a good chance of finishing it off.
And, when a bill has already been vetted by the committee and the Chair knows everyone is on board with it, when the (basically) exact same bill comes up again, just referred over from the other chamber, they will often give it a more pro forma or expedited hearing. So the fact that a similar bill has already had hearings etc and received approval, means that that same bill coming over from the opposite chamber can move forward a lot quicker.
Finally what happens is that most bills are never passed as standalone bills. The are including in some larger omnibus or budget or larger "topic" bill. For example, we are often angling to get things into the federal transportation omnibus bill, which is (supposed to be) passed every six years. So you spend much of the preceeding five years working on "marker bills" of this sort, working them through the process, getting cosponsors to sign on, holding hearings on them, etc. And the whole point of all this process is to convince the chair of the committee and their staff, of maybe something like a bipartisan group of 4 top committee leaders on that topic, that this bill has the support and has been refined and vetted enough, and supported by committee members with enough influence and sway, to be included in the final version of this omnibus bill.
Now if the Chair includes it, then it is likely to move along without a lot of opposition and make it into the final version of the bill. If not there is always the chance that your sponsor will introduce it as a committee amendment and it can then be included in the bill by a majority vote of the committee. However, there are a LOT of committee members, and a LOT of potential amendments that could be introduced, and the committee rules will inevitably have SOME limitation on the amount of amendments that can be introduced. So even if your sponsor has the opportunity and committee time to introduce an amendment or two, you had better be sure that YOUR amendment has strong enough support that it is high on your sponsors priority list. Because they can probably introduce like one or two amendments, not 10 or 20. Again, the work you have done over previous years to build and demonstrate support for your bill is going to be the determining factor here.
Anyway, if all goes very well then your marker bill is adopted as part of the omnibus bill that is voted out of committee, and then it goes to the floor for a vote. Now again there is the opportunity for amendments and a floor vote of the full chamber on those. But again, there will be time for a limited number of amendments, so if you are lucky none of those amendments is attacking your little bit of marker bill language and so when the bill is finally passed, it includes your language.
Hooray!
Oops, but we forgot the OTHER chamber has also been working on their version of the bill, so you'd better hope that your bill and language was included in that, too! Because this time around Senate leadership is from the opposite party and they don't like House leadership's bill at all so they drafted up their own completely different version of the bill from scratch and didn't include any of the House language at all. When they receive the House's version of the bill, they just scratch it all out, replace it with their own version, pass it, and send it back.
The House doesn't like this at all, leading to many press releases etc. The bill goes to Conference Committee, which consists of several Senators and Representatives, usually from the relevant committees, and they have the job of reconciling any differences between the two bills.
In this case, because of the dynamics of the situation the Senate has the upper hand and its version of the bill carries the day, with only a few additional tweaks to it coming from the House bill, as agreed to in the Conference Committee.
That Conference Committee bill goes back to both chambers, which both pass it.
Now the President (or Governor) signs it and it becomes law.
And, so sad, without the bill you have been working on for the past five years. Even though it had so much support and so many positive hearings in both chambers. But Senate Committee leadership just didn't like it and so that was the end of it.
No need to worry, though - another omnibus will will be coming in 6 more years. Get started now and maybe it will make it all the way through next time around!
So, you can see why these things can take years to decades to move. And the process as described in Schoolhouse Rock is kinda there in a background kind of way, and plays as role, but a lot of other things play an even more important role.
And it is possible for a bill to be introduced and passed in just one year. But those are typically really top of the ticket items that have unified support and a high priority with top leaders of both chambers AND the president or governor. Whatever issue you might be working on, it is astonishingly rare that it is one of the handful of issues that has that kind of priority with everyone, and also is noncontroversial enough so as to avoid coming under direct fire from the opposition party - which might be enough to stop it even despite strong support in all levels of leadership.
And if it all sounds complicated and intricate, with many opportunities for setbacks or complete derailment - that's because it is. That is one reason these things take so long.
And we always say: It is easy to STOP a bill and super-hard to MOVE a bill forward. That's another reason most bills take repeated tries before their final success. Maybe your bill has just ONE powerful enemy, who manages to stop it every year. OR maybe your bill sponsor has a powerful enemy, perhaps even within their own party, who is working behind the scenes to prevent their bills from moving.
A few years, one or two of our state senators have taking to gumming up the process completely, because they object to this or that. The end result is that NOBODY'S bills get passed - beyond the absolute essentials like the required state budget. There have been a bunch of very mad people at the state capitol after sessions like that.
And even a noncontroversial bill with good support can be derailed by chance circumstances - it's just a roll of the dice. It gets on the calendar but session ends before they work their way down to your bill - that type of thing. If you keep rolling the dice again and again, year after year, eventually the fates align just perfectly and your bill passes. But it usually takes repeated tries, even for the very simplest and most noncontroversial type of thing.
TL;DR: Six years, give or take. But it's complicated . . .
posted by flug at 1:50 AM on December 17, 2022 [11 favorites]
What happens is, you have an idea for a bill and you have developed (or work to develop) a constituency for it. So that part can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few decades.
Then you find a sponsor for your bill, ideally the right sponsor - ie, the right party, someone who is in the "in" group with leadership, maybe a bipartisan pair of sponsors, etc.
They introduce the bill and then you can work on getting cosponsors for it. If it is pretty noncontroversial then you might be able to get a lot of supporting legislators to sign on, ideally from both parties, and that helps a lot. (You will get a few more chances at this as it moves along over the years, so you might only get a few cosponsors the first time around but if all goes well you might get more in future years.)
Then, if your sponsor has the right connections and pull, you get a hearing on the bill. This might happen the first year it is introduced or it might take a few tries.
At the hearing you are going to find out everything wrong with your bill. The opponents will come out of the woodwork. They will attack it, or parts of it. Lots of bills die at this point, when it becomes obvious that the opposition is substantial and no reasonable compromises will be possible.
But if you are lucky, you encounter opposition that has some concrete demands and issues, and you work with them and figure out compromise language for the bill that will keep them happy (enough).
So that all might take a year or maybe two or three. Often in our state legislature, new bills or things the Committee Chair doesn't really put his weight behind have a hard time getting a committee hearing early on in session. So even if it goes well (which it usually doesn't), the hearing often happens too late in session for the bill to have a realistic chance of moving forward that year. But you take the changes and support you have found for the bill this year, and the sponsor talks to the committee chair and tries to get and agreement to get going earlier next year now that an acceptable form of the bill has been reached.
Now i haven't even mentioned that you probably moved your bill forward as described above, in only one chamber. Often at our state level (and in Congress, too) that is the House because it has far more members, far more committees, and generally far more time to consider far more bills.
So as you are moving the bill forward with sponsors in (say) the House, you are also looking for sponsors in the Senate. But usually that is a quite a bit harder and so you don't make much headway. But now that the bill has developed some support in the House and looks like it has some promise to move forward, now maybe you can find more support in the Senate. Also maybe your bill sponsor or other supporters have some good relationships in the Senate so they can get a friend to carry the bill, or maybe do some horse trading or arm twisting to get a motivated sponsor there.
Point is, this kind of jockeying often takes a few years (!) or even more to work out. Maybe the bill gets all the way through the House a time or two, then it's sent to the Senate and they find a Senator to carry it there, but by the time it has worked its way all the way through the House process it is coming to the Senate pretty late in the session and so they have a hearing (and here maybe you find out all the things that people object to NOW that it looks like the bill has an actual chance to pass, so maybe more revisions or updates or compromises must be made). But after a try or two of this (which, again, can mean 1-3 years more), maybe your Senate sponsor starts to really like the bill and sees that it has a good chance to actually pass.
So the following year your Senate sponsor also introduces this (now pretty battle-tested) version of the bill early on and gets and early Senate hearing, and since the bill now has most all the kinks worked out and committee members supporting it - they have now had hearings on it several times - and it passes out of committee early in session.
Your House sponsor(s) also get an early hearing and early pass out of session.
So now it is moving forward with a chance of actually getting through the calendar and passing BOTH houses at a reasonable clip.
(Now you're going to say - you can't just pass a bill in the House and another bill with the same language in the Senate and then it's passed! True, you can't. So why do you do this?
Well, first off this is as giant horse race with a very tight deadline and only like 1% of the horse ever pass the finish line. So now you have TWO horses in the race which gives you a double chance of getting at least one of them over the finish line.
Also, whichever bill has manages to move along first, partly due to good planning and partly due to good luck, you can jump on that one with a good chance of finishing it off.
And, when a bill has already been vetted by the committee and the Chair knows everyone is on board with it, when the (basically) exact same bill comes up again, just referred over from the other chamber, they will often give it a more pro forma or expedited hearing. So the fact that a similar bill has already had hearings etc and received approval, means that that same bill coming over from the opposite chamber can move forward a lot quicker.
Finally what happens is that most bills are never passed as standalone bills. The are including in some larger omnibus or budget or larger "topic" bill. For example, we are often angling to get things into the federal transportation omnibus bill, which is (supposed to be) passed every six years. So you spend much of the preceeding five years working on "marker bills" of this sort, working them through the process, getting cosponsors to sign on, holding hearings on them, etc. And the whole point of all this process is to convince the chair of the committee and their staff, of maybe something like a bipartisan group of 4 top committee leaders on that topic, that this bill has the support and has been refined and vetted enough, and supported by committee members with enough influence and sway, to be included in the final version of this omnibus bill.
Now if the Chair includes it, then it is likely to move along without a lot of opposition and make it into the final version of the bill. If not there is always the chance that your sponsor will introduce it as a committee amendment and it can then be included in the bill by a majority vote of the committee. However, there are a LOT of committee members, and a LOT of potential amendments that could be introduced, and the committee rules will inevitably have SOME limitation on the amount of amendments that can be introduced. So even if your sponsor has the opportunity and committee time to introduce an amendment or two, you had better be sure that YOUR amendment has strong enough support that it is high on your sponsors priority list. Because they can probably introduce like one or two amendments, not 10 or 20. Again, the work you have done over previous years to build and demonstrate support for your bill is going to be the determining factor here.
Anyway, if all goes very well then your marker bill is adopted as part of the omnibus bill that is voted out of committee, and then it goes to the floor for a vote. Now again there is the opportunity for amendments and a floor vote of the full chamber on those. But again, there will be time for a limited number of amendments, so if you are lucky none of those amendments is attacking your little bit of marker bill language and so when the bill is finally passed, it includes your language.
Hooray!
Oops, but we forgot the OTHER chamber has also been working on their version of the bill, so you'd better hope that your bill and language was included in that, too! Because this time around Senate leadership is from the opposite party and they don't like House leadership's bill at all so they drafted up their own completely different version of the bill from scratch and didn't include any of the House language at all. When they receive the House's version of the bill, they just scratch it all out, replace it with their own version, pass it, and send it back.
The House doesn't like this at all, leading to many press releases etc. The bill goes to Conference Committee, which consists of several Senators and Representatives, usually from the relevant committees, and they have the job of reconciling any differences between the two bills.
In this case, because of the dynamics of the situation the Senate has the upper hand and its version of the bill carries the day, with only a few additional tweaks to it coming from the House bill, as agreed to in the Conference Committee.
That Conference Committee bill goes back to both chambers, which both pass it.
Now the President (or Governor) signs it and it becomes law.
And, so sad, without the bill you have been working on for the past five years. Even though it had so much support and so many positive hearings in both chambers. But Senate Committee leadership just didn't like it and so that was the end of it.
No need to worry, though - another omnibus will will be coming in 6 more years. Get started now and maybe it will make it all the way through next time around!
So, you can see why these things can take years to decades to move. And the process as described in Schoolhouse Rock is kinda there in a background kind of way, and plays as role, but a lot of other things play an even more important role.
And it is possible for a bill to be introduced and passed in just one year. But those are typically really top of the ticket items that have unified support and a high priority with top leaders of both chambers AND the president or governor. Whatever issue you might be working on, it is astonishingly rare that it is one of the handful of issues that has that kind of priority with everyone, and also is noncontroversial enough so as to avoid coming under direct fire from the opposition party - which might be enough to stop it even despite strong support in all levels of leadership.
And if it all sounds complicated and intricate, with many opportunities for setbacks or complete derailment - that's because it is. That is one reason these things take so long.
And we always say: It is easy to STOP a bill and super-hard to MOVE a bill forward. That's another reason most bills take repeated tries before their final success. Maybe your bill has just ONE powerful enemy, who manages to stop it every year. OR maybe your bill sponsor has a powerful enemy, perhaps even within their own party, who is working behind the scenes to prevent their bills from moving.
A few years, one or two of our state senators have taking to gumming up the process completely, because they object to this or that. The end result is that NOBODY'S bills get passed - beyond the absolute essentials like the required state budget. There have been a bunch of very mad people at the state capitol after sessions like that.
And even a noncontroversial bill with good support can be derailed by chance circumstances - it's just a roll of the dice. It gets on the calendar but session ends before they work their way down to your bill - that type of thing. If you keep rolling the dice again and again, year after year, eventually the fates align just perfectly and your bill passes. But it usually takes repeated tries, even for the very simplest and most noncontroversial type of thing.
TL;DR: Six years, give or take. But it's complicated . . .
posted by flug at 1:50 AM on December 17, 2022 [11 favorites]
Flug's description is great. I'd only make a few additions or changes.
First, bills almost never get actively killed in Congress or in most state legislatures. Bills usually die from simple inattention and inactivity. The way I usually explain this is that the idea that committees kill bills is wrong in an important way -- referring a bill to committee kills it. What the committee can do is choose to resuscitate it, or just leave it dead.
Things differ *A LOT* from one state legislature to the next but sitting for several months with no activity might or might not be a sign that it's already dead. If you want to get a better sense, you should look in the bill tracking system you're using for some bills that passed last year to see how long they spent in various stages of the process.
Some state constitutions or legislative rules require that every bill introduced get at least one hearing, committee vote, or floor vote. I don't have a current list of which states those are but the short answer is that those states are not obviously better-governed than other states.
Second, very little is both uncontroversial and commands a natural majority of the legislature. Nobody is standing up and saying "Hey, should we ban theft?" Legislatures in general already did all the easy stuff, leaving current sessions with harder questions. Almost all legislation is some mix of controversial and technical, which means proponents have to actively do work to build a majority coalition behind the bill. Hence the years.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:06 AM on December 17, 2022 [3 favorites]
First, bills almost never get actively killed in Congress or in most state legislatures. Bills usually die from simple inattention and inactivity. The way I usually explain this is that the idea that committees kill bills is wrong in an important way -- referring a bill to committee kills it. What the committee can do is choose to resuscitate it, or just leave it dead.
Things differ *A LOT* from one state legislature to the next but sitting for several months with no activity might or might not be a sign that it's already dead. If you want to get a better sense, you should look in the bill tracking system you're using for some bills that passed last year to see how long they spent in various stages of the process.
Some state constitutions or legislative rules require that every bill introduced get at least one hearing, committee vote, or floor vote. I don't have a current list of which states those are but the short answer is that those states are not obviously better-governed than other states.
Second, very little is both uncontroversial and commands a natural majority of the legislature. Nobody is standing up and saying "Hey, should we ban theft?" Legislatures in general already did all the easy stuff, leaving current sessions with harder questions. Almost all legislation is some mix of controversial and technical, which means proponents have to actively do work to build a majority coalition behind the bill. Hence the years.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:06 AM on December 17, 2022 [3 favorites]
I am a DC Hill person and the ins and outs of Congress are still mostly obscure to me. What I recommend is getting in touch with the office that sponsored the bill to ask about progress. Since you have a personal interest, this could be effective advocacy and possibly help keep you informed.
posted by haptic_avenger at 5:48 AM on December 17, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by haptic_avenger at 5:48 AM on December 17, 2022 [3 favorites]
Just adding that states are wildly variable, from in session all the time to one month every other year. That's only a slight exaggeration. I work on legislation in CA - our session runs from January to September, and the budget is done by the end of June (in normal times, at least.). I had colleagues in New Mexico where they only meet for 1 or 2 months a year.
California has a good legislation tracker and I hope most states do at this point. You can subscribe to different bills and get updated when they move.
But as an advocate with an organization that sponsors bills, I will say it is always messier than it looks on paper. Sometimes we are trying to speed things up or slow them down or subject to the whims of a committee chair.
If you have any California specific questions I can try to find answers for you.
posted by gingerbeer at 10:31 AM on December 17, 2022 [3 favorites]
California has a good legislation tracker and I hope most states do at this point. You can subscribe to different bills and get updated when they move.
But as an advocate with an organization that sponsors bills, I will say it is always messier than it looks on paper. Sometimes we are trying to speed things up or slow them down or subject to the whims of a committee chair.
If you have any California specific questions I can try to find answers for you.
posted by gingerbeer at 10:31 AM on December 17, 2022 [3 favorites]
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