Why doesn’t it pass?
Most people picture one vote. There are six conditions, they are not all votes, and the one that stops the most bills involves no vote at all. Move the numbers and see where yours stops.
Build the support
You have a bill. Decide how many members of each chamber are behind it, and what the people with procedural control decide to do. The stations underneath resolve as you move.
Does the committee chair schedule it?
Do both chambers pass the same text?
Does the President sign it?
The outcome
It dies at senate debate, with 220 in the House and 52 in the Senate behind it.
52 senators cannot close debate. The bill has majority support and never reaches a vote on passage. This is the station most people do not know is there.
- ClearsCommitteeThe chair schedules it
- ClearsHouse floor218 of 435
- Stops hereSenate debate60 of 100 to end it
- Never reachedSenate floor51 of 100
- Never reachedOne textBoth chambers pass the identical bill
- Never reachedThe PresidentA signature, or 290 and 67 to override
The station without a vote
Set both sliders to the maximum. Every member of the House and every senator supports the bill. Now tell the committee chair not to schedule it. The bill is dead, and no vote was ever cast, so there is no record of anybody stopping it.
The House does keep an escape hatch. If 218 members sign a discharge petition, a bill can be pulled out of a committee that will not move it. The signature threshold was raised to 218 in 1935, from the 145 originally required, which tells you how the chamber felt about the escape hatch even then. Between 1931 and 2002, the period the Congressional Research Service’s own count covers, 563 discharge petitions were filed, 47 reached the required signatures, the House voted for discharge 26 times, passed 19 of those measures, and two became law.
The fairer reading of that number, and the one the report itself makes, is that the threat does some work the count does not capture. Committees and leadership sometimes act precisely to head off a petition, and in about 16 per cent of discharge attempts the measure reached the floor by one route or another. So the escape hatch is not decorative. It is just not a door most people can open.
On the sixty
Ending debate in the Senate takes three-fifths of the whole chamber under Rule XXII, which is sixty votes when there are no vacancies. That is a threshold for stopping discussion, not for passing anything, and it is why a bill can hold fifty-nine supporters and never face a vote on its merits.
Whether that rule is good is a live political argument, and this page does not take a side in it. What is worth saying plainly is that it is symmetrical. Every governing majority of the last several decades has been stopped by it, and every minority of the same period has used it. If you are reading the arithmetic above and feeling it favors the people you disagree with, wait a cycle.
Where this leaves you
Roughly seven per cent of bills introduced in a Congress become law, and most never get any action in committee at all. That figure usually gets told as a story about dysfunction. It is at least as much a story about arithmetic: six conditions, each individually reasonable, that have to hold at the same time.
The part that should bother you is not the failure rate. It is the visibility. A floor vote is recorded, attributable and easy to ask about at a town hall. A bill that dies because a chair never scheduled it produces no vote, no roll call and no moment anyone has to explain. The most consequential decision in the whole sequence is the only one that leaves no trace.
Which is a strange thing to build a system of accountability on. You can find out how your representative voted on everything that reached a vote. What you cannot find out is what they wanted to reach one.
The six thresholds, in plain text, with sources
1 — Committee
A bill is referred to committee on introduction. It advances only if the committee acts on it, and most never do. No vote is required to stop one here.
2 — House floor
Passage takes a simple majority of those voting: 218 of 435 when every seat is filled and every member votes.
Source: U.S. Constitution, Article I.
3 — Ending Senate debate
Cloture on legislation requires three-fifths of senators duly chosen and sworn, which is 60 with no vacancies. Invoking it caps further consideration at 30 hours. A rules change needs two-thirds of those present and voting instead.
Source: Senate Rule XXII; CRS RL30360, Filibusters and Cloture in the Senate; CRS 98-425.
4 — Senate floor
Passage takes a simple majority, 51 of 100 with no vacancies, with the Vice President breaking a tie.
5 — One identical text
Both chambers must pass the same text before it can go to the President. Differences are resolved by amendment between the houses or in conference, and the reconciled text is voted again in both.
Source: Congress.gov, How Our Laws Are Made.
6 — The President
A signature enacts it. A veto can be overridden only by two-thirds of each chamber, which is 290 in the House and 67 in the Senate at full membership.
The escape hatch
A discharge petition signed by 218 members can bring a measure out of a committee that has held it for at least 30 legislative days. Between 1931 and 2002: 563 filed, 47 reached 218, 26 discharge votes carried, 19 measures passed the House, 2 became law. Counting measures that reached the floor by any route during a discharge attempt, about 16 per cent of attempts produced floor action. The signature requirement was raised from 145 to 218 in 1935.
Source: CRS 97-856, The Discharge Rule in the House; CRS R45920, Discharge Procedure in the House.
The seven per cent
More than 10,000 bills are considered in each Congress and roughly 7 per cent become law. Most languish in committee without any action.
Source: GovTrack, Historical Statistics about Legislation in the U.S. Congress.