School rock im just a bill11/25/2023 In the role of presidents, is there a change from administration to administration? Are some presidents more involved in this complicated process than others? Basically, every committee gets a certain amount of money. You don't have to spend all of it and you also don't have to say exactly what it's going to be for. Think of the budget resolution as a checklist for how much money you can spend on certain categories. It's basically Mitch McConnell and his members trying to get Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema to vote for any potentially controversial issue. And it comes with these really obscure rules where every senator can propose unlimited amendments. ![]() Whenever a party doesn't have full supermajority control of Congress, they're going to be forced into this process every time they try to do special budget bills. And in order to go through this process in the Senate, we had a vote-a rama that went to four in the morning. Another concept that’s popped up, that’s not part of the Schoolhouse Rock lesson is vote-a-rama. And the only other way to try to get bills to the floor is to attach it to a ‘must-pass’ government shutdown looming kind of legislation. The only other thing that motivates Congress to get things done is a deadline. It's the only game in town if you want to have substantial changes to policy. It is extremely rare for either governing party to be able to put together a package that can actually get signed into law. The only way it can get to the floor is if the party leaders on each side can say, ‘we have the votes to pass this.’ And to add to the complexity, when we're talking about the infrastructure bill, we're really talking about two: the bipartisan infrastructure bill and a separate $3.5 trillion dollar bill that was split off because they realized this wouldn't pass the filibuster but instead with reconciliation? But they're not the ones who are going to have the gavel at the end of the day, approving a bill out of the committee and sending it to the floor. These very senior committee chairmen like DeFazio who supposedly have all this power, in the end they don't really have any say? It's never going to see the light of day. Now his bill isn't anywhere, it disappeared. He really wanted the Senate to take up his bill instead of their own bipartisan version. ![]() That's what both parties have to agree to before you can even agree to write a bill.Ī House chairman who is in charge of infrastructure and transportation, Peter DeFazio, had this whole bill ready. The more accurate version of this Schoolhouse Rock video right now might be about frameworks and proposals and more than the actual legislation. Did the old version of Schoolhouse Rock “I’m just a Bill” leave anything out? That's why this bipartisan group has basically gone rogue. ![]() You have to have bipartisan cooperation, and that doesn't exist in the vast majority of legislation.īut are you going to have the two party leaders from the Democratic side and the Republican side sitting in a room and hashing things out? No. You can't only have the Democratic chairman writing and passing bills, and sending them to the president. Sure, they agree on plenty of things, but the big hurdle that Democrats have been dealing with for years is the Senate filibuster, that 60-vote margin. Yes, if you think about the chairmen in both the House and Senate, they're both Democrats. It's so much now: What's the impact going to be politically, what is the reason for party leaders to put this bill on the floor, and how do you get the votes for it when it is on the floor? And it's not just committees, there are also bipartisan gangs that are part of the process? There has to be behind the scenes negotiations for weeks, if not months. If there's any kind of controversial bill, it's going to have a lot more than just the steps of going through committee and getting to the House floor. What are people not seeing or not understanding about the current process? This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Before drawing it all out, Wuerker spoke with POLITICO congressional reporter Sarah Ferris to better understand all those extra steps it now takes to pass a bill.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |