Committees and Bills

From last time:

The inside game and the outside game:  in LBJ's time in the Senate, the outside game scarcely counted.  Gingrich and C-SPAN start to change things.  Newt v. O'Neill 1984 (start clip at 9:30)

The conference/caucus holds separate elections for leader/speaker,whip, and other posts. The people holding these jobs are often intraparty rivals.  They work together, but warily.

From Robert Caro's Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

He tried to teach his young assistants to read men—“Watch their hands, watch their eyes,” he told them. “Read eyes. No matter what a man is saying to you, it’s not as important as what you can read in his eyes”—and to read between the lines: more interested in men’s weaknesses than in their strengths because it was weakness that could be exploited, he tried to teach his assistants how to learn a man’s weakness. “The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he’s not telling you,” he said. “The most important thing he has to say is what he’s trying not to say.”

Stylistic comments

• Please, no "the purpose of this paper is..."
• In US English, periods and commas go inside quotation marks. Superscripts follow punctuation.
• Do not dangle your modifiers or split your infinitives!
• Avoid dropped quotations.
• Cut down on -ize words and management-speak.
• Avoid the passive.
• Use endnotes with Arabic numerals.

For next time, Davidson, ch. 8

Simulation committees?

The committee system

• How members end up on committees
• "Steering committees" in House & Senate (Davidson pp. 180-186 of 19th ed)
• Speaker-appointed House committees: Rules, House Administration, Intelligence
• Seniority and other criteria
• Removals:  The case of Ilhan Omar
• House and Senate jurisdictions are not quite the same.

LEGISLATION REALLY CAN PASS 

Also see 2019 public lands bill.  

Congress.gov record of the bill

We shall read Jill Lawrence's account of a similar bill from a few years ago.

Bill Drafting 

• How an idea becomes a bill
• Types of measures
• Drafting guide
• An example of legislative language: BITCOIN Act of 2024)
• Senate Legislative Counsel
• House Legislative Counsel

Acronym Bills

• The EARN IT Act
• The STOP STUPIDITY Act
• The EL CHAPO Act
• The OMAR Act
• The NO CORRUPTION Act

Rules

• House Rules -- a guide
• Senate Rules

Do They Read The Bills? No.  

USA PATRIOT Act:  “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism