How Our Laws are made.
June 3, 2010 10:48 AM   Subscribe

 
I'd like to see a chart showing what percentage of introduced bills survive to each stage. I'd also like to see a chart showing the relative spending on lobbying at each stage (i.e., which parts of the process do the lobbyists target?).
posted by jedicus at 11:01 AM on June 3, 2010


I wish this showed more of the decision points at each step in the process, because, for example, if a bill is never calendared, it never goes onto any of the subsequent steps, and there's never any guarantee a bill will get calendared, as far as I know (at the state level, at least, bill calendaring is at the sole discretion of the legislative leadership).

What this chart misses is the extent to which critical decisions that affect the life of a bill can be made outside these formal legal processes (when a bill is killed in committee simply by never being taken up, for example).
posted by saulgoodman at 11:01 AM on June 3, 2010



Obligatory.
posted by Esoquo at 11:02 AM on June 3, 2010 [3 favorites]


Cue "Schoolhouse Rock" references...
posted by longsleeves at 11:02 AM on June 3, 2010


I was going to snark and say, "Where's Reconciliation?" but, yep, there it is.

Two comments:

1. This looks way more complex than you would think it need be.
2. I still prefer the "Schoolhouse Rock!" version.
posted by cjorgensen at 11:02 AM on June 3, 2010


Heh.
posted by longsleeves at 11:02 AM on June 3, 2010


Ha! Preview is my friend.
posted by cjorgensen at 11:02 AM on June 3, 2010


Nice graphic - I was just thinking about this in view of the YouCut post earlier.
posted by exogenous at 11:06 AM on June 3, 2010


jedicus, about 85% of bills never make it past the referral-to-committee stage, and the ultimate passage rate is around 4%.
posted by MrMoonPie at 11:17 AM on June 3, 2010 [2 favorites]


The actual numbers are in the Resumes of Congressional Activity. Resumes are compiled annually, so you really must add the stats from both sessions of a two-year Congress to come up with meaningful numbers--there's usually a flurry of introductions at the beginning of a Congress, and a flurry of passages at the end.
posted by MrMoonPie at 11:23 AM on June 3, 2010 [2 favorites]


jedicus, about 85% of bills never make it past the referral-to-committee stage, and the ultimate passage rate is around 4%.

Thanks for the hard numbers MrMoonPie. I did a formal analysis of the Florida senate's legislative processes as part of my job several years ago (I literally walked through the whole process and sat in on session, etc.), and I was floored by how important all the stuff that happens outside the formal legislative process really is. So I'd argue that the most critical omissions in this chart are all the opportunities for informal deal-making that take place just to get bills referred to committee or on the appropriate agendas at each stage.
posted by saulgoodman at 11:27 AM on June 3, 2010


In Congress, getting onto a calendar is more or less automatic for bills that have emerged from committee (I'd have to check my Oleszek bible to see what the formalities are and I'm away at a conference).

But getting back off a calendar is what's missing here.

There should be a section in the House talking about generating and approving a special rule, and one for the Senate about generating and approving a unanimous consent agreement. Both of these pull bills off of the calendars so that they can be voted on long before they would have been if they'd stayed on the calendars.

The House section also needs a separate pathway for bills considered under Suspension of the Rules. This is the thing where nobody can offer any amendments, but it requires a 2/3 vote to pass.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 12:34 PM on June 3, 2010


I realize that the process can't be as simple and straightforward as we might like, but surely we can do better than this?
posted by sotonohito at 12:46 PM on June 3, 2010


saulgoodman, having done a bit of legislative work myself, I'd have to say that I think that a lot of what you describe as "stuff that happens outside the formal legislative process" is some combination of either 1) actually part of the legislative process or 2) benign at worst or actually really important at best.

You seem to be operating under the assumption--and feel free to correct me here--that the "formal legislative process" consists of a legislator proposing a bill and that bill getting voted on. If that's your definition of legitimate legislative activity, then yeah, this chart would be maddening.

But the way things actually work is that most bills deserve to die without a vote. Have you spent much time mucking about with THOMAS? Just do some quick browsing. Say, H.R. 1257, the Damaged Vehicle Information Act, and H.R. 3241, the ABC Act. Or pick any random number you want. Odds are pretty good you'll get something either completely unrealistic or completely banal.

Back now?

Okay, first, not only are there all sorts of nonsense bills introduced just so that the legislator can tell his constituents that he's introduced it, but there are competing and redundant bills proposed just so that some congresscritter can get his name on legislation. Most of these deserve to die the quiet deaths that they do.

Second, legislative text has to come from somewhere. These things don't spring Athena-like from congresscritters foreheads. Statues are subtle pieces of work--the ones that have a prayer at passing anyways--which take a large number of people to craft, write, and edit. The long process you're seeing here is actually how these sorts of things work.

If anything, I'd object to the chart because it over-plays the role that legislators have in bills becoming laws. Most of the grunt work is done "behind the scenes" as it were, and a lot of legislation is actually written by either legislative aides or lobbyists themselves. I mean, who would you rather write your legislation: incompetent kleptocrats or people who, while obviously possessed of axes to grind, might actually know what they're talking about? The House of Representatives and Senate are simultaneously the seat of legislative power and farcical political theatre. True, without their say-so, nothing happens, but they aren't really the source of anything that does happen either. At best, they tell their people to do good stuff and essentially rely on them to do it. I'd be shocked if more than 10% of Congress reads more than 1% of the text of the bills they vote on. That isn't really what they're there for, populist protestations to the contrary.

The reality is that legislative bodies consist of some few hundred, equally-empowered legislators, all of whom are generally permitted to propose as many bills as they like. Most of them do. Much of this "back-room" stuff is little more than figuring out who is proposing what and who's got the votes to make things happen. I know of no other way of sorting through the thousands of bills that get proposed every year. We're currently north of 5400 in the 2009-2010 session of Congress, and that should easily pass 7000 if not 8000 by the end of the term. A hundred bills a week isn't unusual.

So the fact that so much of the process goes on "outside the formal legislative process" isn't a bug, it's a feature, and it's contemplated by the Constitution in that each house is given the authority to set its own rules of procedure. Legislative bodies have always worked this way, as far as anyone can tell. Indeed, far from being "outside" the process, this sort of horse-trading is the legislative process. There's a reason the sausage-making metaphor has stuck around.
posted by valkyryn at 1:00 PM on June 3, 2010 [3 favorites]


surely we can do better than this?

Which parts would you eliminate?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:01 PM on June 3, 2010


valkyryn, we're already close to 9000 bills in the 111th Congress, and that's not counting resolutions--there are just over 5400 House bills, but you didn't count the Senate. The average number of measures introduced is closer to 15,000 per Congress.

Oh, and another fun number: 24% of all laws passed in the last (110th) Congress had as their sole purpose the renaming of a post office.
posted by MrMoonPie at 1:25 PM on June 3, 2010


You seem to be operating under the assumption--and feel free to correct me here--that the "formal legislative process" consists of a legislator proposing a bill and that bill getting voted on. If that's your definition of legitimate legislative activity, then yeah, this chart would be maddening.

Well, Valkyrn, this experience was nearly eight years ago, so many of the details are now fuzzy in memory, but specifically I had in mind those informal decision points in the process (again, based on my experience with one state legislature's processes) where someone in a leadership position can simply omit putting a bill on a particular agenda for initial or further consideration throughout the process.

Often, I'm led to understand (though I won't claim to have seen any of this first hand), those kinds of discretionary decisions to kill or not kill a particular piece of pending legislation at key points in the process are decided as a result of outside deal-brokering. As in, Senator A might say to Senator B who heads such and such committee: If you want me to include this legislation in the committee meeting packet--if you want us to report out on this draft legislation during this committee meeting cycle--then you'll need to see what you can do to take up my legislation in your committee, etc. It's these kinds of informal transactions among the legislative leadership that get and keep legislation moving through the process (again, at least at the state level) that I think contribute more to the ultimate fate of some piece of proposed legislation than is represented here.

Are committees at the federal level required to report out on every bill referred to them? Or can the committee leadership kill bills in committee at the federal level by never putting them on an agenda? I'll admit, my memory's fuzzy on the specific decision points where these kinds of informal decisions could be made, but I remember there were quite a few of them. (We were trying to develop a system to track legislation through the process, and so we had to account for the possibility of legislation simply dying in the process anytime that was a possibility in our design, which is why it seemed so striking to me at the time there were so many opportunities for legislation to stall or die in the process.)
posted by saulgoodman at 1:33 PM on June 3, 2010


If that's your definition of legitimate legislative activity, then yeah, this chart would be maddening.

I didn't mean to call the legitimacy of those processes into question. It just seemed awfully striking to me that most of the processes described in diagrams like this one do miss most of the really important stuff that goes into a bill making it through the process. The formal part of the process is more like theater than a real, functional process (hell, during session, everyone even reads from the same script)--which makes you wonder what purpose does it even serve.
posted by saulgoodman at 1:38 PM on June 3, 2010


saulgoodman, only 15% of all introduced bills make it out of committee at the Federal level.
posted by MrMoonPie at 1:39 PM on June 3, 2010 [1 favorite]


ROU_Xenophobe I don't know if there's any specific step I'd eliminate or if it'd be better to scrap the entire lumbering process and start over, or if I'm just crazy for thinking that there probably ought to be a simpler process. Maybe its just the inevitable fact that to outsiders everything looks overly complex.

The maze of back and forth between committees, calendar committees, etc just seems pointless and designed to be confusing and to allow as many people to muck with bills as possible. Why not simply let people introduce bills, allow X time to pass for review, then take a vote?
posted by sotonohito at 1:44 PM on June 3, 2010


Well, sotonohito, it is true that the committee process seems to serve at least one legitimate purpose: making the high volume of proposed legislation somewhat more manageable. As has been described up-thread, far too many bills to be considered in a given legislative session are proposed every year.

The committee system allows the work of reviewing and processing those bills to be distributed among committees with special technical focuses. The current system is basically an adaptation to handle the massive volumes of highly technical legislation that enters the pipeline. But the downside is it also creates a lot of opportunities for power-brokering, and potentially, corruption in the process.
posted by saulgoodman at 1:54 PM on June 3, 2010


Why not simply let people introduce bills, allow X time to pass for review, then take a vote?

One reason is to make more certain that the review happens. Committee systems in Congress do this by making it more or less impossible for a bill to come to a vote without being first approved by the committee.

Another reason is more broad and technical. It's been known for a long time that simple systems of group decision making, such as you describe, go to complete shit if the decisions have more than one dimension to them. The technical lingo for this is a chaos theorem; look up McKelvey. The basic idea is that in an institution-free, simple majority rule legislature, almost anything can happen -- a legislature can lurch from outcome to outcome to outcome by a series of simple majority votes, possibly eventually arriving at an outcome literally everyone thinks is very bad, and whatever outcome is finally selected can have no connection to anyone's preferences. This is not merely an academic exercise -- if you have ever gone to the video store with five friends and walked out a while later with a headache and a movie nobody wants to watch, you've experienced a chaos theorem in action. Another way to think of it is that no matter what the status quo is, there's a majority who prefer something else. And if we select one of those things that majority prefers, there's some other majority who prefers something else. Rinse and repeat. No matter where we are, you can always find an alternative that beats it by majority rule, and something beats that too.

At any rate, the point is that in the absence of additional rule-systems ("institutions" or "structure"), a group of people making decisions together has no natural endpoint. So legislatures impose lots of institutional structure on themselves to foster a reasonable equilibrium. The technical lingo here is "structure induced equilibrium."

A simple example is how bills and amendments are considered. There's no reason it has to be this way; it wasn't imposed by Zeus, but the last vote taken always compares the bill, as amended, to the status quo. Taking votes in this order instead of some other order limits bills that pass to the WARNING TECHNICAL LINGO win-set of the status quo, which is good.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:00 PM on June 3, 2010 [5 favorites]


Are committees at the federal level required to report out on every bill referred to them?

No.

Most bills die because, once sent to committee, the committee pays no attention to them and they disappear into the legislative ether at the end of the Congress. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:05 PM on June 3, 2010


This isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Agreed, but it does confer more power on certain committee leaders--so not all legislators play an equal role in the legislative process. In a way, that means we don't always necessarily get equal representation for our votes. States whose reps have seniority or chair important committees get more say in the outcomes.
posted by saulgoodman at 2:10 PM on June 3, 2010


How is ammendment formed? How law get pastted>?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:28 PM on June 3, 2010 [1 favorite]


Missing from this chart: "Incumbent Senator's campaign war chest is low; anti-incumbent sentiment high; general election in 6 months. (Lobbying Opportunity)"
posted by ZenMasterThis at 9:25 PM on June 3, 2010


But the downside is it also creates a lot of opportunities for power-brokering, and potentially, corruption in the process.

Perhaps, but I think that was true anyways. And the upshot of a system like this is that while it does create opportunities for power-brokering, it also creates opportunities for accountability. True, the committee chairmen can wield what is arguably inordinate power, but because they're identifiable people in identifiable positions, we also get to hold them accountable for how they use it.

Granted, this doesn't actually happen most of the time, largely because the American media and populace have little patience or inclination for plumbing the depths of federal legislative procedure, but that doesn't change the fact that the opportunity is there.
posted by valkyryn at 7:16 AM on June 4, 2010


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