As Aristotle said, “At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.” Even in Aristotle’s time, humans realized enforcing well-designed laws was critical to the function of any empire. Today, the greatest empire is (arguably) the United States of America, and it happens to have one of the most complicated processes ever for enacting a law. And in the end it leaves people wondering, “Why don’t good laws get passed?”
First, what is the actual process? As a side note, there are many exceptions and minutia to the “basic” process that I won’t discuss for the sake of brevity.
A bill starts as an idea that an interest group wants to pass. The interest group then promotes the bill through activism until they meet a legislator. If they convince the legislator of the bill’s potential, the legislator introduces the bill, and the senate leader refers to the corresponding committee assuming the bill starts in the senate. Bills can start in the house as well, but they undergo a similar process with a few differences. For context, in the Senate, there are various committees that each have a specific purpose and are comprised of a small subset of the Senate.
The committee assigned to the bill is tasked with writing the bill in legal language and then afterward holds a vote. If the bill wins a majority, it is appointed a date to be voted on by the full Senate. If the majority of the Senate supports the bill, then the bill is passed over to the House.
In the House, the bill is also voted on. However, the House’s proponents of the bill often make some changes to the legislature for it to pass, causing different bills to be voted on in the two houses. Occasionally, the bill isn’t modified, but it almost always is.
Assuming the bill is modified, the House sends it to the conference committee, which tries to create a “compromise” bill including elements from the bills passed by the House and Senate. The compromise bill is then sent to the House and Senate, which each vote on it, and if the bill wins in both houses, it is sent to the president.
The president then has ten days to decide whether to pass or veto the bill. Congress can try to override the president’s choice if a bill is rejected, but the hearing requires a supermajority (2/3) to succeed. Yes, even after all this work, it is the president alone who decides the legislature’s fate.
Of course, I still haven’t explicitly stated why most bills, even good ones, fail. And the truth is, there is no single reason. The problem is the multitude of points of failure for any single bill. Even well-liked bills could be put in a hostile committee, filibustered, vetoed, bribed (I mean lobbied) away, or just about anything else that kills it. The sheer number of steps needed for a bill to become law makes it very unlikely to be enacted. In the end, only 4.5% of bills become laws.
But is such a tight process truly a bad thing? While the founding fathers may not have foreseen filibusters or committees, they intended the process to be complex. On the positive side, most defective bills are quickly and effectively weeded out, while uncontroversial bills, such as thanking groups of veterans, are swiftly passed.
Ultimately, the American system may be confusing, needlessly complicated, and occasionally reject great ideas, but it has proved itself by surviving the test of time.
source:
https://medium.com/@SJsenthil/why-good-laws-dont-get-passed-d40e7296f3ea.
