Parliament v Congress - technical differences

Factual Questions
1

We all have read about the basic contrasts between the US and the UK’s political systems - presidential v prime ministerial and all that - but what about the more technical differences, the nitty-gritty?

I know some details about the way the UK Parliament works and I strongly suspect they are wildly different in the US, so Americans and Brits, please fill in the blanks and offer any other aspects you’re curious about :slight_smile:

Lexicon:

UK: ‘Government’ in the UK refers, generally, only to the Cabinet and the parties that form it - ‘Her Majesty’s Government’.

US - ‘Government’ refers to all three branches listed in the US Constitution - President, Congress, and Judiciary. The equivalent of the Queen-in-Parliament of the UK.

Legislation

UK: the passage of Bills is dominated by the Government. Any Member of either House can table a Bill but Private Members’ Bills have a very low success rate. The Government has access to the Parliamentary Counsel which excels at crafting technically detailed legislation.

Most government bills are subject to a ‘guillotine’ motion, meaning the House sets a strict time-limit to how long it should debate a particular stage of the legislative process. Once that time limit expires, the Speaker moves the House on to the next stage. Filibustering can happen, but it’s rare and not at the extremes of the US.

All Bills follow generally this procedure in both Houses, but we’ll focus on the Commons:

First Reading - the Bill is laid and ordered to be printed. No debate.

Second Reading - the Bill is discussed in general terms, Members speechifying what they think of the Bill as a whole and what objectives they think it should meet. Once done, the House appoints a committee to consider the Bill in detail.

Committee Stage - Public Bill Committees are appointed ad hoc to consider a specific Bill, and once done, the committee dissolves. Size can range from 15 to 30 or 40 Members, sometimes larger. Special rooms are set out for them in the Palace, and due to their size of the culture of the legislative process, they can be a little like the House in miniature, with heated debates, party-based grandstanding and a minister normally present.

The committee goes through the Bill line-by-line making amendments as voted, in accordance to the views of the House expressed at Second Reading. A lot of the amendments are instigated by the Government, but some backbench ones can get in too.

Report Stage - the committee ‘reports’ to the House on the changes it made, and these are individually voted on by the whole House - some undone, some affirmed. Further amendments can be made by the House.

Third Reading - the Bill is in its final stages and occasional technical amendments are offered by the Government, but otherwise a brief debate has it sent to the other House.

The Lords follows broadly a similar procedure, although Committee Stage is normally done as a Committee of the Whole House. The Commons does these only sometimes, usually for Bills with constitutional reform aspects.

Finally, in the case of Bills that start in the Commons, the Lords can block their passage (if it chooses to) for one session only (which is usually 12 months), following which, if the Commons resurrects the Bill, the Lords cannot block a second time. So it has a delaying power.

If there’s any amendments made in the Lords it returns to the Commons for those amendments to be approved. There are no joint committees for resolving differences in legislation and instead the Houses will spend a period of time communicating directly on what amendments they approve and what others they reject - known as ‘parliamentary ping-pong’. If an amendment is insisted on by one House and refused flatly by the other - ‘double insistence’, the Bill dies.

US: I don’t know much but I do know that both Houses seem to have exactly equal powers, and cannot override the other. I also get the impression that committees have a far stronger control over legislation than the floor of the House does, and there are joint committees for resolving legislative differences. Also, I hear sometimes that a ‘Senate’ version and a ‘House’ version of the same Bill can be swilling around at the same time. That never happens in the UK - what’s that about?

Committees

Both Houses of Parliament have committee systems but they remain subservient to the Chamber itself. There are some that consider legislation but otherwise, they focus purely on inquiry work and getting explanations from ministers.

Commons committees by and large follow the remits of government departments - so the ECC committee shadows the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), and so on. Lords committees tend to be cross-cutting - a committee on communications, for example, or a committee on science and technology - which also do inquiries, but given the Lords’ larger pool of expertise, tend to be very technical and detailed.

Finance

UK: There are separate pieces of legislation in the UK Parliament for taxation and for spending. The Budget generally proposes what taxes will be imposed and the Commons must then vote on it. Spending proposals come at various times but involve specific votes for the Commons to approve a sum being committed to a department, project, and so on.

There is a Standing Order in the rules of the House of Commons forbidding any proposals for increases the public tax or spend burden being considered by the House unless a Minister of the Crown adopts it.

All of these go to the Lords as well, but if no amendments are tabled within 30 days, the Lords loses its chance to do anything, and it can never block anything to do with public spending or tax. Normally the Lords steers well clear of interfering with anything of a financial nature.

US: Budgets start in the House according to the Constitution, but the Senate retains complete freedom to chop and change what it likes, and to block outright if it wishes - right?

Other business

UK: the business of the Commons tends to be dominated by the government’s priorities, although it works with the leadership of the other parties and the Speaker to ensure they don’t take the michael, and the Opposition parties get allocated Opposition Days for the House to discuss material of their own choosing.

The majority of backbench business is filled up with Questions - the bread and butter of parliamentary scrutiny - and a minister is always in the Chamber to answer questions relating to his department. Specific questions to a department are allocated to a periodic day. Prime Minister’s Questions is weekly.

The Lords is self-regulating, meaning the government has a lot less control over its agenda, although the Chamber normally gives government business priority in the name of a good working relationship. Again, questions are a large part of business, but the Lords also deals with a lot of motions for debate, in which the Members will have long discussions regarding topics of interest.

Filibusters are rare, and quorums are not something really bothered about. In the Commons, a quorum is 40, and in the Lords, a quorum is three, including the Lord Speaker and Deputy Speaker.

The Commons Speaker is powerful but is expected to be impartial to all sides of the House, and is not necessarily from the governing party. In fact, the Speaker renounces their party allegiance upon election to the Chair. The Lord Speaker is considerably less powerful as the House is self-regulating, and is more a ceremonial position if anything.

So, is that illuminating to curious Americans, and I’d be interested to learn how Congress does it differently!

2

When it comes to legislation, both chambers have essentially equal powers, except that only the House can initiate revenue bills. The House and the Senate can initiate any other kind of bill. Bills are proposed by any member of either house, and generally given to the appropriate subject-matter committee(s) of that house for review. If it is an issue of major national importance, both houses may work on bills addressing it simultaneously - this is common since everyone wants a bit of the glory.

The committees will then hold hearings to hear testimony about the proposed legislation, and will work on it some more. If it manages to make it to a stage where a majority of the committee finds it tolerable, it will be reported to the full chamber, where it can again be amended and tweaked by other members. If the bill finally passes the chamber, it will be sent to the other chamber for their approval. There, it typically goes through the committee process again and the other chamber will tweak and modify things until they are satisfied and report the bill. If the other chamber is already working on their own version they might ignore the first one entirely.

If the bill finally passes the second chamber, it is probably quite different from the one that passed the first chamber. An ad-hoc conference committee (not joint committee - those are different) will be appointed to negotiate a compromise between the two versions. If a compromise can be reached to the satisfaction of the conference committee, it will report the bill back to both houses, who can then vote on it. Only when both houses pass the identical bill will it go to the President for approval or veto.

Legislating is hard.

Committees in the US Congress are divided up among subject-matter areas and are primarily responsible for reviewing and working on legislation in those areas. All sorts of government bureaucrats are also required to provide regular reports about their activities to various committees, and bureaucrats will regularly be asked to testify in regard to proposed legislation. There is no “shadow” system, since the Congress and executive branch are not organized the same way. But every committee has a chairman from the majority party (or theoretical coalition) and a ranking member from the minority. The majority party is often not the same party as the President and is often not the same between the House and Senate! This leads to all kinds of fun times.

Pretty much.

3

Thanks for contributing friedo! The simultaneous bills thing does seem a bit of wasted effort to me - the UK system treats the whole think like a manufacturing line, and they time their work so they are finished with one Bill and another comes along - but I guess that’s the spice of life for you.

I guess in the UK then this ‘witness testimony’ bit is missing, or is equivalent to the minister defending his Bill in the House?

Oops yes, I did mean conference committee, of course. They are unknown in the UK - are they public meetings, so people can see what caused a Bill to fail?

Interestingly, in the UK, the chairmanships are divided up between the parties. So for example, in the Commons, half the chairs will be the Government, and roughly a third Labour, a smidgen Lib Dem and SNP…and different again in the Lords. By convention, the chair of the powerful Public Accounts Committee is always a member of the Opposition.

We don’t have minority committee machinery here, and committees (apart from the public bill committees) tend to be pretty consensual and the chairs co-ordinate but don’t dictate.

How big is the staff of a committee? Commons committee staff here can sometimes be sizeable at 8 or 10, but Lords committees tend to have just three staff - a clerk, a committee assistant, and a policy analyst.

4

Yeah, but remember that the Lords are not really politicians, but our Senators are. The Senate and the House also have rather different cultures owing to the Senate’s much longer (and staggered) election cycle, smaller size, and equal representation, vs. the House’s larger size, two-year cycle, and proportional representation. The result is that a lot of things that might easily pass the House would never fly in the Senate and vice versa. So there are always going to have to be compromises, and the parallel processing is sometimes useful for working those details out.

It’s sort-of similar in that executive political appointees may be called to testify regarding a bill. But Congress can call anyone to testify – low-level civil service employees, interested members of the public, lobbyists, captains of industry, labor leaders, etc. Anyone who might have something politically useful to say. The primary job of legislative committees in the American tradition is fact-finding. Congress also has their own research service and library to help them in this matter.

Conference committee meetings are not public, but the proceedings of each chamber are, so you can always read reported bills and committee reports on the LOC website. If a bill fails in conference there’s not really any way to know precisely why, except by hearsay. And everyone involved will likely have a different opinion.

They can vary quite a lot. The powerful House Ways and Means Committee has a staff of nearly 100 last time I looked. Lesser House committees may have staffs of around 40 or 50. Senate committees have staffs of around 40. Standing joint committees also have staffs, and every member of the House and Senate also has a small staff for their own office. (Committee chairmen, ranking members, chamber leaders, and minority leaders get more, naturally.)

5

A couple more notes about the American system: First, there’s no set number of steps, nor a metronome that sets the pace of the steps. Either house can drag its feet at any stage of the process, and the cycle can repeat for as long as it takes.

Second, the conference committee isn’t actually an essential step. In practice, that’s usually the way that both houses end up passing identical bills, but it can happen in other ways. For instance, with the Affordable Care Act, the Senate passed one version, the House added a few amendments and passed the new version, and it was expected that the Senate would probably follow at least some of those amendments as hashed out by committee… except that then, Senator Ted Kennedy (one of the bill’s biggest proponents) died, putting the Senate below a filibuster-proof majority, and making it politically impossible for that chamber to pass anything further. So the House had the option, and took it, to take the Senate version, even though it hadn’t passed through a conference committee, and vote straight up-or-down on it with no amendments.

6

Here (USA) the term “government” is pretty much the overall term for the ENTIRE United States Government. In other words, that which is created and defined by the Constitution.

The particular executive (president) and all his advisors and his cabinet members are called the “administration”, for example, the Reagan Administration or the Clinton Administration. This seems to be equivalent of that which parliamentary systems call the “government”. Thus, every time we get a new president, we have a new administration, just as every time a parliamentary system gets a new Prime Minister, you call that a new “government”.

So it seems odd to Americans, to hear of British or French or Italian, etc., governments “falling” or otherwise being replaced by a new government. In America, the “government” is a very stable thing that lasts theoretically forever. We are now on just our second government (the Articles of Confederation, 1781-1789, having been our first government). The current Constitution, having been ratified in 1789, has been our “government” ever since (subject only to a few adjustments in the form of Amendments). But we’re on our 44th president, which loosely means our 44th “administration”. (Presidents can change advisors at will, and commonly do when they are re-inaugurated for a second term, but that isn’t consistently called a new administration.)

In contrast, you parliamentary governments have your “governments” falling left and right all over the place. How many “governments” has Italy had, just since World War II? To us, that sounds awfully unstable. But to you, it’s just what we would call a new administration.

7

And anything even remotely connected to governance, at any level, in any branch. The president is the government, the fire department is the government, the streets are paved by the government, etc. This is why you see Americans calling the BBC “government-run” every so often; to us it is government run because we would see the BBC Trust as a government body.

Not just that, sometimes you get situations where the Senate completely replaces a House bill and turns it into an appropriations bill on some other topic entirely.

The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) as ultimately passed was the “Senate version,” but the Senate can’t originate that kind of legislation, so it took a House bill on another topic and amended it into its version of what Obamacare should look like.

8

Oh, Lords may not all be professional politicians but there are a large chunk of professionals in there, and they all still have political views and attitudes.

Committees here have the same task of fact-finding too, and they have access to libraries and dedicated research staff (the Commons, anyway), but it’s not considered a main job of UK sessional committees to process legislation.

What can happen here, though, is that a committee could undertake an inquiry - for example, into mental health care on the NHS - and at the end of the report propose a Bill that solves the problems identified in the report. The Government then replies and if it approves of the idea it might take that Bill, tweak it, and lay it before the House. But beyond that, committees tend not to touch the Bill.

As I said there are exceptions, mostly in the Lords - the Constitution Committee looks at all Bills to check what impact they will have on the constitution, Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee looks at Bills to ensure any secondary legislation is properly made, and the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee warns the House of irregularities in secondary legislation.

That’s curious. Is there any logic as to why they are not public? Are most committees private?

Wow, that’s a lot! Ours seems considerably more…streamlined, by comparison. It seems that instead of minority staff on committees, our chairs compensate by being more consensual.

I also get the impression that congressional committees can be extremely adversarial when questioning witnesses. When they are shown on TV they seem to be huge affairs - big rooms, raised seats for the Members, major press presence, almost like a court. Parliamentary committees are considerably more laid back and conversational.

So, hang on, if I have understood it correctly, this is what is meant by separate versions:

  1. Bill starts in Chamber A and goes through stages, gets amended, and passed to Chamber B;
  2. Chamber B considers Bill from A, makes amendments. This inherently becomes ‘Chamber B’s version of the Bill’
  3. both Chambers then have a conference committee to try to settle differences over Bill versions A and B. Result, ideally, is Bill C, which is agreed by both Chambers and sent to the President.

But it can also happen like this:

  1. Bills initiated in Chambers A and B simultaneously on same subject. Wildly different in ordering of sections, wording etc, but essentially doing the same thing
  2. conference committee resolves these differences into a single Bill, C, which is sent to the President.

Have I got that right?

9

One point about conferences between the Houses to resolve disagreements over amendments is that this was in theory the system used in the British Parliament in the eighteenth century. But it was one that was already in decline by the time of the American Revolution. The main problem was that MPs disliked them because, unlike the peers, they were expected to stand throughout. They therefore preferred to conduct any negotiations in writing. That, of course, was one factor that wasn’t relevant when Congress copied the older system.

10

One thing that no one has mentioned is the House Rules committee. Every bill must be approved by the Rules committee. The house rules require that bills be taken up in the order in which they were introduced. But there are hundreds, if not thousands, of what you would call private members bills and important bills can be considered only by first passing a “special rule” to take it up out of order. And the special rules come from the Rules committee.

In practice, no bill can be considered it the relevant committee chairs (one being the chair of Rules) approve. There is a complicated procedure called a “discharge petition” for getting a bill out of committee, but it is quite rarely invoked.

So there are many choke points in the system. In order to get a bill passed you need the agreement of
–the chairs of two house committees
–the membership of two house committees
–the whole house
–the chair of the senate committee
–the membership of the senate committee
–at least 60 members of the senate
–the president
and last, but not least
–the Supreme court.

With all these veto points, it is amazing anything ever gets passed. Of course, I have skipped over something. Of course, I have glossed over details; e.g. a presidential veto can be over-ridden. And while a committee chair can effectively veto sometimes, they cannot do it all the time without losing the chair.

The Canadian system is derived from and similar to the British. One thing is that the prime minister can essentially dictate any law he pleases. Parliament cannot effectively prevent it. The reason is that a member of parliament who votes against the party leader will be expelled from the party and cannot run for re-election under the party’s banner, which is usually the end of his career. A result of this is that the parliament could as well be replaced by buttons on a voting machine. So that Canadian elections are essentially votes for a prime minister (always the leader of a party).

11

That’s what happens most of the time, yes.

No, a bill can only be sent to the President after both chambers have passed identical versions - the conference committee has no power to act on its own. But sometimes what happens is that one chamber will throw out its own bill and adopt the other chamber’s bill with no changes. In that case, no conference committee is required.

The reason conference committee deliberations are not public is because they’re not holding hearings or conducting official business, they’re negotiating.

12

Actual discharge petitions are quite rare, but the threat of them is fairly common. In practice most committee chairs would rather let a bill out so it can fail on its own merits (perhaps after being sabotaged by the committee) than face an embarrassing discharge petition, even if the petition itself fails.

13

Yes, it’s missing, except to the extent that a MP or member of the House of Lords raises some issue at Second Reading or (more likely) Committee stage, either on the basis of personal expertise or (quite often) external campaigning, and/or the government can be persuaded to change their minds. Often these can be relatively technical issues that have been missed in the initial preparation of the legislation, and the government would be willing to consider amendments. There was a recent TV series about the operations of Parliament, following a group of MPs old and new through the different sorts of things they might do. One of these involved a new opposition member with considerable personal experience of a topic (child protection, as it hppens) proposing an amendment to proposed legislation tightening up procedures for handling allegations of child abuse, and getting a sympathetic response from a minister (or at least a promise to consider her amendment seriously).

There are established procedures for wider consideration of proposals under development (formal consultation, “Green Papers” and so on), but there isn’t a stage at which parliament has hearings to let members of the public or invited expert witnesses speak directly to legislative proposals once they’ve been put before parliament.

The “manufacturing line” analogy for UK legislation is well chosen. Another one that’s sometimes used is “sausage machine”!

14

In practice, boring routine bills usually start in one house, and then get passed on to the other house. But big important bills usually start in both houses at once. They’re not likely to be completely different in things like ordering of clauses, though, because there’s informal collusion before the official process even starts. The actual text of a bill is often written by some sort of advocacy group, and a member of each house who’s sympathetic to that advocacy group will officially submit the bill, more or less as-is.

15

I think that’s a bit unfair. The Prime Minister has to make compromises in order to prevent a backbench rebellion defeating his legislation, and a PM who avoids too many rebellions can be seen either as a good anticipator of problems or a terrifying leader. But the latter will cause cracks to appear eventually.

The 2010-05, and 2005-10 parliaments are known as the most rebellious in recent British history (since the War), interestingly. MPs seem more willing to defy whips in the name of special causes and whips are losing their power.