Question

Prepare a research paper on how a piece of tax legislation becomes tax law. Your research should include:

An explanation of the various levels of government involved in the process.

An analysis of the how a House of Representatives tax bill can differ from a Senate bill.

An explanation of the role of the general public in the tax legislation process.

Answer 1

Congress’s primary duty is to pass laws. The legislative process is often slow, just as the framers of the Constitution intended. The framers believed that a slow-moving legislature would be less able to infringe on citizens’ rights and liberties.

Bills and Laws

Most bills that Congress considers are public bills, meaning that they affect the public as a whole. A private bill grants some relief or benefit to a single person, named in the bill. Many private bills help foreign nationals obtain visas, but they can cover a variety of other matters.

The process through which a bill becomes law occurs in several stages in both houses:

1. Introduction: Only a member of Congress may introduce a bill. After a bill is introduced, it is assigned a designation number. Only members of the House of Representatives may introduce bills concerning taxes.
2. Referral to committee: The leader of the house in which the bill was introduced then refers the bill to an appropriate committee or committees.
3. Committee action: The committees can refer the bill to subcommittees for action, hearings, markup sessions, and votes. The committee can also kill the bill by doing nothing at all, a process known as pigeonholing.
4. Referral to the full body: If a committee approves a bill, the bill is sent on to the full House or Senate.
5. Floor debate and vote: The full body debates the bill and then votes. The two houses differ significantly in how they handle debate:
   • In the House, the Rules Committee has the power to limit debate and the number of amendments offered during debate. A vote in which every member’s vote is recorded is called a roll-call vote.
   • In the Senate, members are allowed to speak as much as they wish and to propose as many amendments as they wish. There is no Senate Rules Committee.
6. Conference committee: Often, the two houses produce different versions of a single bill. When this happens, both houses appoint members to a conference committee, which works to combine the versions. After the conference committee’s report, both houses must vote on the new bill.
7. The President: The president’s only official legislative duty is to sign or veto bills passed by Congress. If the president signs the bill, it becomes law. If the bill is vetoed, it goes back to Congress, which can override the veto with a two-thirds vote in both houses. Veto overrides are rare—it is extremely difficult to get two-thirds of each house of Congress to agree to override. Instead, presidential vetoes usually kill bills.

Sometimes the president chooses to do nothing with bills that Congress sends. If the president still has not signed or vetoed the bill after ten days, the bill becomes law if Congress is in session. If Congress has since adjourned, the bill does not become law. This is called a pocket veto.

Representatives (also called Congressmen or Congresswomen) introduce "House Bills", designated by the letters "HR" (House Resolution) before the number of the bill (which is assigned when the bill is "dropped" - literally - in a "hopper" in the House) and Senators introduce "Senate Bills" (designated by the letter "S" before the number of the bill). A member of the House of Representatives do

es not have a say on any Senate bill and a Senator does not have a vote on a House bi