HRES 545
114th Congress
House
Congress
Legislative rules and procedure
Senate
Calling for an end to the abuse of the Standing Rules of the Senate and to improve the debate and consideration of legislative matters.
Introduced: December 2, 2015
See on congress.gov
Everywhere this bill has been
2 steps
Introduced
In committee
Reported out
Passed House
Passed Senate
To President
Became law
Dec 2, 2015
Referred to the House Committee on Rules.
Dec 2, 2015
Introduced in House
Plain-English summary
Expresses the sense of the House of Representatives that:
- the Standing Rules of the Senate and debate practices should not be abused to debilitate it and indefinitely block debate or a fair, up or down vote on legislative matters;
- after the Senate sets a new precedent to restore its workings, it should negotiate and adopt, under its existing rules of a supermajority vote to invoke cloture, a parliamentarian procedure to replace the cloture motion to call up legislation and make it pending, with a "non debatable motion to proceed to consider" that allows for the minority to offer a reasonable number of germane amendments, subject to debate, once the measure is pending for consideration;
- these proposed number of germane amendments and debate hours and mechanism to truncate debate could be decreased or increased at the time that the rule change is negotiated and adopted, ensuring the appropriate center between sufficient adversarial debate and the prevention of chronic stalemate is both a Senate majority and minority determination; and
- nothing in this resolution shall be construed as the House advocating a wholesale abolishment of a Senate filibuster mechanism or supermajority cloture requirement, or calling for the classic standing and talking Senate filibuster to be abolished, but that the House believes it should be reinvigorated.
Encourages the Senate to forbid threats of a filibuster derived from an "anonymous hold," and in its place reinvigorate the "traditional standing filibuster" or "hold the floor" mechanism of dissent, with a time allocation of up to 100 hours and the ability to truncate debate only by a petition of 60 Senators.
What's happening now
Referred to the House Committee on Rules.
Committees of jurisdiction
1