How a Bill (REALLY) Becomes a Law

Our final "Back to School" episode is a nod to how we started in the first place. Our show was created to be "Schoolhouse Rock for adults," and no mention of Schoolhouse Rock is complete without a sad little scrap of paper hoping to become a bill. Today we're exploring how that bill, sitting there on Capitol Hill, becomes a law. This episode features the voices of Andy Wilson, Adia Samba-Quee, Alizah Ross, and Eleanor Powell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Nick Capodice?

  You're listening to Civics 101 from NHPR. I'm Nick Cappadicei. It is September, and my fellow parents out there know that this is the time that school starts, at least for a day, before they get days off for Labor Day weekend or something like that. But since we have some new listeners to Civics 101, we decided to ourselves go back to school. We do episodes on current events constantly, but we are, first and foremost, a show that explains the basics of how our government operates. It's how we started. And today is, without a doubt, our most-used episode in classrooms.

• 0:49Nick Capodice?

  It is as Schoolhouse Rock as you can get: how a bill really becomes a law. Stick around.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's fall drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy-to-layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on lululemon.com now.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI: your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

• 1:56Speaker 03

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot, designed to keep you connected, powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 2:27Nick Capodice?

  Well, here it is. Saw this coming a mile away.

• 2:45Hannah McCarthy?

  Do kids even know about this? Schoolhouse Rock?

• 2:48Nick Capodice?

  I don't even know. It was an educational animated TV show from the 1970s. I think we should ask a student.

• 2:55Hannah McCarthy?

  Do you have one in mind?

• 2:58Speaker 05

  Hello?

• 2:58Nick Capodice?

  Hello?

• 2:59Speaker 05

  This is Nick. Great.

• 2:59Nick Capodice?

  It is Nick. What's up, Adia?

• 3:01Speaker 05

  Yes, Nick! Hi!

• 3:04Hannah McCarthy?

  Adia! Hi, Adia.

• 3:06Nick Capodice?

  Adia Samakui was our first student contest winner. She's a civics friend. She had just finished taking a test when I called her. What was the test on?

• 3:13Speaker 05

  First and second New Deal programs. And then describe like how, like, some of them still exist in real life. And then talk about like how like they were successful or not in like ending the Great Depression.

• 3:25Nick Capodice?

  I asked her if she knew the song "I'm Just a Bill."

• 3:29Speaker 05

  Yes, I had to watch it in fourth grade. We didn't even know what, I remember that, where they even talk about the process of like a bill becoming law. Oh, gosh. Like, I know how a bill becomes a law, but not with the help of a video.

• 3:42Nick Capodice?

  So then I called a teacher, Eliza Ross. She teaches high school AP Gov. I asked her if she shows it to her class.

• 3:49Speaker 05

  Every time.

• 3:50Speaker 06

  Oh, yes!

• 3:51Speaker 05

  They love it. They ask for it. And then there's always like one or two kids that are like, I've never seen it. And then I feel like they have to see it. I think that there are some details that are definitely missing.

• 4:02Hannah McCarthy?

  So what's missing?

• 4:10Speaker 06

  Yet a lot of wisdom. Millions of Americans tune into Duck Dynasty. So I want to point out just a few words of wisdom from Duck Dynasty.

• 4:20Speaker 06

  Probably good for all of us to hear.

• 4:24Nick Capodice?

  I'm Nick Cappadicei.

• 4:25Hannah McCarthy?

  And I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 4:26Nick Capodice?

  And today on Civics 101, in our Starter Kit series, we are going to follow that thread through the labyrinth. We are going to see how a bill really becomes a law. And I wasn't dragging on Schoolhouse Rock. It taught me that bills are brilliant ideas that are proposed, they go through committee, get voted on, go to the other house, end up on the president's desk. Zip zap zap, Bob's your uncle.

• 4:48Hannah McCarthy?

  So that's the sort of ideal version it's supposed to work?

• 4:51Nick Capodice?

  This is Eleanor Powell. She's the Booth Fowler Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin.

• 4:56Hannah McCarthy?

  In practice, it very rarely works that way, and it's certainly not that simple. So in this unorthodox, messy world in which we live, essentially, there are two paths.

• 5:08Nick Capodice?

  Two roads diverged in a chamber of Congress.

• 5:11Hannah McCarthy?

  So one is the really easy path, where essentially, if everybody's on the same page, there's not a lot of bipartisan disagreement, there's not a lot of conflict. What happens is essentially, both chambers use these expedited procedures. The other path, the path of most legislation that you actually read about in the paper and you hear about in the news, is the stuff that's more controversial, where there's more partisan disagreement. That stuff gets hard and very messy.

• 5:37Nick Capodice?

  We're going to follow the complicated path for now. So, part one: coming up with it.

• 5:42Speaker 06

  So the first thing is, you have to come up with a bill. You have to have an idea, and then you have to translate that idea into what's called legislative language.

• 5:50Nick Capodice?

  I talked to Andy Wilson. He's a former staffer on Capitol Hill.

• 5:53Speaker 06

  An actual bill that adds to or amends some part of the United States Code of Laws.

• 6:01Nick Capodice?

  Members of Congress work with their staff to write bills. They can also get help, if they need it, from the nonpartisan Office of Legislative Counsel, experts on legal language and how to write laws.

• 6:12Speaker 06

  So sometimes, when you have the idea and you have it written, you take some time to gather up support for the bill as cosponsors before you introduce it.

• 6:19Nick Capodice?

  If you've got several members of Congress as cosponsors to a bill, that's like a signal that this bill has lots of support. Cosponsors are just adding their name to it. They might not have even read the thing. Bills in the House can have a few cosponsors, they can have hundreds of cosponsors, which makes them many times more likely to become a law. And as to crafting a bill, I never knew this, anybody can write one. Special interest groups, lobbyists, people who are raising money for your campaign, it just has to be proposed by a member of Congress.

• 6:49Hannah McCarthy?

  So, once you, along with your staff, the Office of Legislative Counsel, and anyone else you fancy, have written a bill, where does it go?

• 6:58Speaker 06

  In the House, you have to take it down to the Clerk of the House, which is a team of people that sit near where the president gives the State of the Union address every year. And you actually have to drop the physical piece of paper with the legislative language on it into a box, and that box is called the hopper.

• 7:15Hannah McCarthy?

  The hopper?

• 7:16Nick Capodice?

  Yes. In 2003, they replaced their hopper from the 1950s. It's just a wooden box.

• 7:23Speaker 06

  But the clerk takes the bill, gives it a number. It's in sequential order. So the first one in the new Congress is HR1, House Resolution 1, or S1, Senate Resolution 1. And then it's assigned to the relevant committee based on whatever the topic of the bill is. So if it's a bill that has to do with foreign policy, it's directed to the Foreign Relations Committee. If it's got to do with foreign policy, it's referred to the Agriculture Committee, and so on.

• 7:54Hannah McCarthy?

  Who is in charge of deciding what committee it gets assigned to?

• 7:58Nick Capodice?

  That is the Speaker of the House, or the Senate parliamentarian. Sometimes, it even goes to more than one committee.

• 8:04Hannah McCarthy?

  All right. Written, dropped in the hopper, assigned a number, and assigned to a committee.

• 8:08Nick Capodice?

  Right. Part two: committee.

• 8:15Nick Capodice?

  The House has 20 permanent committees, the Senate has 17, and there's also four joint committees, which have members of both the House and the Senate.

• 8:22Speaker 06

  Committees are formed to have expertise in a particular area, so that they can be the first line of review of a particular topic, instead of the whole House having to look at every little thing. So it's both to have deeper expertise on a given topic when looking at the various proposals that come before Congress, and to have a little bit better process and have a more wieldy way in which the Congress can do its business.

• 8:50Hannah McCarthy?

  So who gets to be on these committees?

• 8:52Nick Capodice?

  Before each new Congress, every two years, there's a committee committee who chooses who gets to be in the committees. But what's most important about committees is that whichever party has a majority in the House or the Senate, also has the majority in every single committee. For example, in 2019, the Agriculture Committee in the House has more Democrats than Republicans, and the Agriculture Committee in the Senate has more Republicans than Democrats.

• 9:18Speaker 06

  So that's why, one of the reasons why, you know, the party that's in majority has so much power, because they really have the ability to set the agenda, to set the terms of the debate, and to ultimately decide what is voted on and what What is in committee and in the full house or the full senate.

• 9:38Nick Capodice?

  These bills get read, sometimes for the very first time. They get hearings, they're discussed, experts are called in to speak to the effects of a bill, they get marked up, amendments are added.

• 9:49Hannah McCarthy?

  Question.

• 9:49Nick Capodice?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Hannah McCarthy?

  It's about amendments to bills, the kinds of things that can be added. Did you see the speech that Jon Stewart gave the House Committee on that 9/11 first responders bill?

• 10:00Speaker 06

  Explanation for why. It'll get stuck in some transportation bill or some appropriations bill and get sent over to the senate where a certain someone from the senate will use it as a political football to get themselves maybe another new import tax on petroleum, because that's what happened to us in 2015.

• 10:19Hannah McCarthy?

  What was he talking about?

• 10:20Nick Capodice?

  That line stuck out to me, and I emailed Andy about it. And he said that in the House, amendments to bills have to be, quote, germane. That means that they are relevant to the bill at hand. But in the senate, there is no germane rule. You can propose any amendments on any topic whatsoever to a bill. So if you're a senator and you can't get your own bill to the floor and it doesn't have a lot of support, one thing you can do is get someone in a committee to put the stuff you want as a rider to another different, totally irrelevant bill. But this time period, this process of committee is where most bills die. And it's not because people vote on them in the committee and they say, this is a bad bill, it's just they never get out of committee.

• 11:04Nick Capodice?

  So much time and effort, and it just dies on the vine.

• 11:08Speaker 06

  It can simply disappear into the committee ether and never be heard from again.

• 11:15Nick Capodice?

  And if a bill doesn't make it to the floor for a vote in a congress, it's dead. You have to start from the beginning in the next congress. 90% of bills die in committee.

• 11:27Hannah McCarthy?

  Are committee members required to do anything, like give a bill a hearing?

• 11:31Nick Capodice?

  No, they can just put it in the endless to do pile.

• 11:35Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, so what if by luck and determination and bipartisan support, a bill survives the committee process and the committee reports it out and says, this thing is ready for a vote? Is it then put on the calendar?

• 11:47Nick Capodice?

  Absolutely not, no way. In the House of Representatives, the Speaker of the House decides which bills that make it out of committee gets the floor for a vote. And in the senate, it's the senate majority leader who decides what gets voted on.

• 12:01Hannah McCarthy?

  Theoretically, can the Speaker of the House or the senate majority leader just kill a bill by not letting it get to a vote?

• 12:07Nick Capodice?

  Up until now, I've been talking about the House process and the senate process as being pretty much the same, but here we have a major difference. The Speaker of the House, yes, can kill a bill, but there is a rarely enacted check on that power. It's called a discharge petition, where if a majority of members of the House sign a physical petition, a piece of paper, that bill then gets brought out of committee and onto the floor for debate.

• 12:34Hannah McCarthy?

  What's the check in the senate?

• 12:36Nick Capodice?

  Nothing. There's no discharge petition in the senate. If the senate majority leader does not want your bill to get voted on, there will be no vote. The only check on this power is election, the American people voting in a new majority party.

• 13:01Nick Capodice?

  Maybe you're aware of data brokers, maybe you're not. You should be. And as much as I wish that data brokers was just Brett Spiner managing real estate, it is not. Data brokers are out there, thousands of them. And what they're doing is they are collecting every single thing about you that exists on the internet. And they're taking that huge pile of data and they are selling it to the highest bidder. And unlike Commander Data on the USS Enterprise, these guys are up to no good. So if you want help removing your data from the internet before it gets brokered out, you should check out Incogni.

• 13:42Nick Capodice?

  Incogni takes care of this massive first step in data protection. They help you remove that personal data from the web and they handle the entire process. So to take that first step, to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to incogni.com/civics. That's I-N-C-O-G-N-I dot com slash civics, or just click the link in the episode description box. Again, that's incogni.com/civics. Make it so. I know Data never said that.

• 14:20Hannah McCarthy?

  The older I get, the more I am looking for truly lovable closet staples that I know I will reach for just as often next year as I do right now. I want a closet that doesn't need constant updates or replacements, just high-quality clothes that last, especially the kind with tags that say 100%. As in 100% Mongolian cashmere, 100% mulberry silk, 100% organic cotton, just like the Quince Fisherman Cropped Cardi and I am wearing right this very second. This sweater has kept its shape, color, and softness for years now. I reach for it every single fall, every time I want a warm and elevated look. Quince gives you the quality you expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag.

• 15:05Hannah McCarthy?

  Find the fall pieces you will reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was Civics 101. It's a great way to support the show.

• 15:32Nick Capodice?

  Holiday season is coming, and I don't think I have to tell you this might be a tough one, because things are expensive in the fall of 2026. Everyone I know is looking for ways to make a little extra money, prowling around the side hustle subreddits. But I will say, if you're looking to sell something, to launch a store fast before the holiday rush, Shopify is the one-stop-shop platform for making a professional-looking store without touching a line of code. You can sell anything, and you can sell it anywhere that people shop online. You can have it done in minutes and you can launch before Black Friday, that time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to buy.

• 16:16Nick Capodice?

  So if you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/civics to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/civics. Just go to Shopify.com/civics today to hear your first.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Stay cozy and look cool with up to 60% off cold weather gear at Nordstrom Rack. Save on cashmere, outerwear, boots, and more from brands like Ugg, Vince, Kohan, and Hunter. Join the Nordy Club for free to unlock exclusive discounts, shop clearance and new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack.

• 17:03Nick Capodice?

  Want to talk about debate?

• 17:05Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, sure.

• 17:05Nick Capodice?

  Part three, debate.

• 17:10Nick Capodice?

  First off, the House.

• 17:11Speaker 06

  In the House, there's a really interesting and weird process called the Rules Committee, where any bill that's going to be debated on the full house has to go through the Rules Committee, where the Rules Committee votes on and determines what the terms of the debate will be, how much time will be allotted to each side, what amendments might be in order, and when sort of the votes would be taking place. Generally, that's all controlled by the Speaker of the House.

• 17:41Nick Capodice?

  The rule provides one hour of debate on the motion, equally divided and controlled by the Chair and the ranking minority member of the committee. This is why you hear, I yield the remainder of my time to the Congresswoman from Delaware. But in the senate.

• 17:54Speaker 06

  Do you like green eggs and ham?

• 17:57Nick Capodice?

  There is no Rules Committee. You can talk as long as you like.

• 18:03Speaker 06

  Would you like them here or there?

• 18:07Speaker 06

  I would not like them here or there. I would not like them anywhere. I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  It's worth actually talking about what a filibuster is.

• 18:15Nick Capodice?

  This is Eleanor Powell again, and that was Texas Senator Ted Cruz reading Green Eggs and Ham in an attempt to block the Affordable Care Act in 2015.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  So a filibuster is just any type of delay or obstruction that any individual senator can.

• 18:31Hannah McCarthy?

  can engage in. So it's not just the standing up and talking until you pass out, the sort of old school filibuster that we used to think about. Now, it's really a much broader category. And so the Senate really changed how they handle filibusters. So it used to be you had to hold the floor of the Senate and you talk and talk until you can no longer talk anymore. And that's how you would break a filibuster. You'd wait somebody out.

• 18:54Nick Capodice?

  Cloature stops filibuster. If you invoke cloture, you are asking to end the debate and the filibuster and then have a vote. And it requires 3/5 of the Senate to invoke cloture. 60 votes, which is a ton. The world record filibuster is currently held by Senator Strom Thurmond. He talked for 24 hours and 18 minutes in 1957 to block civil rights legislation. He also apparently took steam baths beforehand to dehydrate himself so that he wouldn't have to pee.

• 19:25Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh.

• 19:26Nick Capodice?

  But it doesn't really work like that anymore.

• 19:28Hannah McCarthy?

  Now, essentially, the way it works is essentially you declare your intent that you would filibuster something. And so instead of trying to wait you out, they're going to try to proceed via cloture or just give up entirely or try to convince your mind, change your mind. And so the cloture vote, you know, getting 60 votes on something is really hard. That's a really tough threshold. And so this distinction where instead of having to talk yourself hoarse.

• 19:56Speaker 06

  You all think I'm late. Well, I'm not late. And I'm going to stay right here and fight for this lost cause, even if this room gets filled with lies like these.

• 20:08Hannah McCarthy?

  Now that you only have to signal that you would filibuster, the costs of filibustering are much, much lower than they used to be for an individual who doesn't like the legislation. And so that's one of the really big changes that we've seen from essentially, you know, the fact that the majority responds to a filibuster by saying, taking the threat as sincere and just saying, all right, we'll either have a vote to try to make you stop or we'll just give up, rather than sort of try and force you to actually hold the floor and have this like long all night marathon. And that's what sort of made the costs of filibustering much lower for any individual senator who wants a change to some piece of legislation. Let me get this clear.

• 20:46Nick Capodice?

  Yeah.

• 20:47Hannah McCarthy?

  You don't need to stand up there anymore to block legislation. You just need to have the 41 people on your side say, yeah, we would block legislation and nobody has to bother with the steam baths.

• 20:57Nick Capodice?

  As things work now in the Senate, that's how you block a bill.

• 21:01Hannah McCarthy?

  So what does this mean for legislation? So it's, it's had a huge impact. I mean, it means in practice now that you have to get, you know, 60% of the Senate on board, you in practice have to have bipartisan buy-in, at least some level of bipartisan buy-in. And that just means very, very few things can pass through the Senate in its current form. And that's why we've seen, you know, the majority in the Senate take increasing steps to actually weaken the filibuster, right? And we no longer allow, you know, filibusters or we lower the cloture vote threshold on judicial nominations, confirmations, that sort of stuff. It used to also require 60 votes for folks to get confirmed. Now we've lowered that because not enough folks were getting confirmed, the majority felt they couldn't get their way.

• 21:46Hannah McCarthy?

  So the Senate makes their own rules for filibuster and cloture.

• 21:50Nick Capodice?

  They do.

• 21:51Hannah McCarthy?

  So theoretically, if the Senate wanted to, they could just get rid of it. They could make cloture always 50 votes.

• 21:57Nick Capodice?

  They could.

• 21:58Hannah McCarthy?

  So are we here yet? The vote?

• 22:04Nick Capodice?

  Right. I'd almost forgotten. The vote.

• 22:07Speaker 06

  The Speaker of the House or the President pro tem in the Senate, whoever's the presiding officer of the House at that time, calls the vote. Sometimes there's a voice vote in the Senate, for example. Each member will come down, their name will be called and they'll say aye or nay. In the House, they typically vote by electronic device, which means each member of Congress has a, it's a little card, like a credit card, and they stick it into a reader and then they press green for yes, red for no, and then the votes are tallied that way.

• 22:44Nick Capodice?

  Remember when Eleanor said that there are two paths to legislation and we've been going down the real gnarly one?

• 22:48Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah.

• 22:49Nick Capodice?

  Let's take a little diversion down the bunny hill. Suspending the rules. If the bill's relatively non-controversial, you can do what's called vote under suspension of the rules. If 2/3 of the House agrees, you can ignore all the rules in debate and procedures.

• 23:05Hannah McCarthy?

  And in the Senate, you actually have a unanimous consent agreement. So literally every single senator is on board and you just go ahead and pass it. And you can just sort of skip all the other rules and the messiness. If people are, if there's no sort of partisan disagreement, we can just do this sort of easy process and lots of legislation passes that way. What kinds of laws get this fast track treatment? Sort of standard, everyday things that may not ever make it into a, you know, a headline in terms of the news, but in which there actually is a fair degree of bipartisan buy-in. So this could be everything from symbolic bills, so renaming a post office, sort of relatively non-controversial things, but even sort of more complicated things, you

• 23:47Hannah McCarthy?

  know, things like, you know, it's tough to even think of examples now because they tend to disagree on everything. But there are, you know, spending bills, there are other sorts of things where we do see bipartisan buy-in, where essentially no one objects and, you know, they've worked out their disagreements behind closed doors. How often is that?

• 24:07Nick Capodice?

  Pretty darn often. In the House, about 60% of bills are passed under suspension of the rules.

• 24:12Speaker 06

  The rules are suspended, the bill is passed, and without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid on the table.

• 24:18Nick Capodice?

  After debate and maybe suspension of the rules, in both the House and the Senate, it just requires a simple majority to win a vote. So it can pass, it can fail, there can be a motion to recommit, which means it's got to go back to committee for some work. But if it passes, all it has to do then is just go to the other chamber of Congress for the same exact process. Committee assignment, committee hearings, markup, amendments, reporting it out, debate, vote. Because before that bill gets to the desk of the president, we've got just one more committee.

• 25:02Nick Capodice?

  If the language of a bill is exactly the same in both the House and the Senate, it goes to the president's desk to be signed, but that very rarely happens. Usually, legislation goes to what's called the conference committee. Senior members of the committees in both the House and the Senate who worked on that bill, they meet and they talk and they argue and they decide one final version that both houses are happy with.

• 25:23Hannah McCarthy?

  And that goes to the president.

• 25:25Nick Capodice?

  That, that, my old friend, that goes to the president.

• 25:30Hannah McCarthy?

  We're so close.

• 25:31Nick Capodice?

  So close, you can just taste it. The last part, presidential actions. The president can sign it and it becomes a law.

• 25:43Speaker 06

  Oh, yes.

• 25:45Nick Capodice?

  The president can also veto it, saying, I don't like this bill, and it doesn't become a law. But the Congress can override a veto with a 2/3 majority vote. Also, the president can just ignore a bill. If it's left on that desk for 10 days, it becomes a law even without the president's signature. However, if the Congress adjourns before those 10 days are up, it does not become a law. This is called a pocket veto. And there you have it. What do you think?

• 26:14Hannah McCarthy?

  It sounds to me like this whole process is mostly about committees. Like the committee is the most important thing.

• 26:20Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, most bills die in committee. Committees determine everything when it comes to bills. And Eleanor said something that I hadn't thought about, that people in committees have areas of expertise and they know people who work in the industry, but the influence of committees on bills has recently shifted.

• 26:35Hannah McCarthy?

  You know, congressional committees are really important in the legislative process, but one of the changes we've seen over the last several decades is party leaders increasingly taking power away from the committees. And a lot of what the committees are doing is sort of implementing changes that the party leaders want to see in the legislation that have been sort of already agreed upon by the majority.

• 26:57Nick Capodice?

  That is my big takeaway for this whole episode, pretty much for the whole series, that nobody can do anything by themselves. Unless one party has the presidency and the House and 61 seats in the Senate, there must be compromise and tons of it before you even begin the process. In the 115th Congress, of the proposed 13,556 bills, 443 became law.

• 27:34Speaker 06

  You want to take a whack at this?

• 27:36Nick Capodice?

  I usually say this for a post-credits joke. You want to lead me in?

• 27:38Speaker 06

  What do I say?

• 27:40Nick Capodice?

  You got to say, "I wonder who that sad little scrap of paper is."

• 27:43Speaker 06

  I wonder who that sad little scrap of paper is.

• 27:47Nick Capodice?

  I'm just a bill. Yes, I'm only a bill. And my fate was pretty much determined by the party in power. Well, I was written by the staff of a member of Congress and also helped some lobbyists and the Office of Legislative Council. But I was dropped in the hopper and given a number.

• 28:08Speaker 06

  [laughing]

• 28:09Nick Capodice?

  Then to the committee I go. But today, I am still just a bill.

• 28:13Speaker 06

  Gosh, Bill, what happens in a committee?

• 28:16Nick Capodice?

  Well, I'll tell you, my young shaver. You see, committees where I'm read and I'm talked about and there's hearings. And if I'm super lucky, I get reported out. That means I'll be killed or sent to the whole house for debate. After the Rules Committee, of course. But the number of members in a committee who decide what gets reported out is directly proportional to the partisan make by the respective chamber of Congress. So for example, if the House has 235 Democrats and 197 Republicans, the committee's going to have about 22 Democrats and 17 Republicans. But if there's no way I can get a 61-person majority in the Senate, maybe the committee says, "Why even bother? Why even bother talking about it? It's never going to work." But if it is reported out favorably in the House, it goes to the Rules Committee, who decides the terms of the debate, what amendments can be added. And the Speaker of the House is the one in charge of the calendar, who, when bills are debated and voted on the floor,

• 28:59Nick Capodice?

  and it's the Senate Majority Leader in the Senate who's in charge of the calendar. And in the House, an absolute majority of members can sign a discharge petition to drag it out of committee and head up to the floor for a vote. But that's happened only a handful of times since 1985. There's also the Hastert Rule, which I didn't get a chance to talk about in the episode. It's more of an informal rule or a petition where the Speaker of the House just won't let bills come to the floor that don't have the support of the majority party, even if the bill could theoretically pass. And we're just getting started. Now we can actually debate and vote on the Senate. But maybe that won't even happen at all. Maybe it's just going to be a special debate. You know, we did debates, and it doesn't mean anything. The votes aren't going to be named after Frankie here again, the third. Hooray, Frank. We're so glad you got your votes wrong.

• 29:37Nick Capodice?

  That's it for this one, and that's it for Back to School. We've got some great new episodes coming your way next week. This episode was made by me, Nick Capodice, and Hannah McCarthy. We each did half of it. Civics 101's staff includes Rebecca Lavoy, Marina Henke, Taylor Quimby, and Dana Catalda. Music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions, Epidemic Sound, and Chris Sabriski. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 30:08Speaker 06

  What does it really take to start a startup? I'm David Rosenko, entrepreneur, investor, and the host of Leap Forward. In each episode, I go behind the scenes with successful founders and someone who knew them before they were famous. Their college roommate, their first employee, or their mom. To hear the sometimes uncomfortable, but very real inside stories of how companies actually get built. Companies like Reddit, Airbnb, or Twitch. Listen to the new season of Leap Forward for never-before-heard stories behind the world's most iconic companies.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's fall drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy-to-layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on lululemon.com now.

• 31:10Nick Capodice?

  Afternoon glare totally ruined my watch party for the big game. That's when my buddy recommended Blinds.com. With custom window treatments made to fit your style, space, and budget, customers who shop at Blinds.com experienced overwhelming satisfaction. Side effects may include a fuller, deeper night's sleep

• 31:28Speaker 06

  and a sudden urge to host the watch party again. Blinds.com isn't a medication, but it can improve how you feel about your home. Visit Blinds.com to order your free samples today. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only. Then full-price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.