Political topic, but this is a factual question, and should be able to stay that way. In its simplest form, the way our legislative system works is that a bill originates in one house of Congress, that house votes on it, and if they pass it, then the other house can pass it, and once both houses pass it, it goes to the President’s desk to be signed or vetoed. That much, everyone who watched Schoolhouse Rock knows. I’m deliberately ignoring complications like amendments and the two houses passing slightly different versions of a bill.
Well, now we have a situation where a bill has passed the Senate, but due to Brown’s election in Massachusetts, the Senate as currently composed would not support that bill, and would not allow any amended form of it to pass. One tactic the Democratic party is pursuing in response to this is to try to persuade the House of Representatives to pass the exact same bill that already went through the Senate, without further modification. OK, everyone who’s following the news probably knows that, too.
What I’m wondering is, what are the limits to this process? For instance, suppose that the current House of Representatives can’t be persuaded to support the bill, but that the 2010 elections bring in a new crop that’s more friendly to it. Can those newly-elected representatives pass the bill that the Senate passed last month, and send it to Obama’s desk? Or maybe, if that doesn’t happen, the folks elected in 2012, or 2014. Is this possible, or is there some time limit built into the system and/or the bills themselves which would prevent it? Could the Senate at any time vote to un-approve the bill, and take it back off the table?
Bills expire with the Congress. Next year, when a new Congress comes in, any bills that haven’t been passed expire and have to be introduced as new bills.
This part isn’t quite correct. Each house of Congress can initiate & pass it’s own bills*. But an identical bill has to be passed in both houses to go on.
Generally, members find someone in the other house to introduce the same bill, so they are proceeding through both houses at once. But since each house can make amendments to the bill, they can be different (sometimes very different) by the time they are passed.
Then they go to a conference committee, made up of a few members from each house. They merge the bills, and come up with a combined version that they think will be acceptable to both houses. Then that combined bill is passed identically in both houses, and goes on to the President.
Except money bills, the Constitution requires that they start in the House.
Chronos had part of that right, technically. House members and Senate members can’t introduce the “same bill,” because the bill that passes both houses has to be identical down to the bill number (Senate bills are S.# and House bills H.R. #). Even a noncontroversial bill, if introduced and passed in otherwise identical form the same day by the House and the Senate, would have to have the House bill passed by the Senate or the Senate bill by the House before it could be sent to the President for signature (or veto).
If in the situation above, the House takes up the identical Senate bill but adds an amendment before passing it, then it would have to go to conference. The Senate could avoid a conference by passing the original House version, sending it straight to the President.
Senators and Representatives like to see the version they sponsored wind up as the law, and will do a little fighting to make sure the other chamber passes theirs. On most bills my understanding is that they take turns on which bill # comes out of conference, or gets taken up when both houses passed an identical bill.
So yes, basically one house passes a bill, then the other passes it then it goes to the President.
Because I don’t think it’s accurate. For example, the historic Civil Rights Act was H.R. #7152, while in the Senate it was S.#1731, with the Title II section pulled out as a separate S.#1732.
The Senate held hearings on its own bills with Senate bill numbers in 1963. However, the party leaders eventually bought the House bill to the floor in 1964, and the Senate cloture votes and final passage vote were on H.R. 7152; see here.
As for the more general question, yes, one bill bearing the same HR.# or S.# designation must pass both houses to be cleared for the President.
It isn’t uncommon for the two houses to begin with parallel bills; in fact, they have to do this if the second house wants to begin action (even in committee) before the first house finishes. But before the finished products can even go to conference, one house must adopt the other’s bill number:
The same applies if a bill doesn’t go to conference but moves directly to final passage. There’s no mechanism in the rules of either house for verifying that two bills with different bill numbers, passed by each house, have the same word-by-word text. Search the list of bills awaiting presidential signature, and you’ll search in vain for a dual designation.