Chapter 8 — Exercises

These exercises are designed to move you from understanding congressional procedure abstractly to reading the procedural status of real, current legislation and discussing reform proposals on the strongest version of each side. Pick whichever exercises your instructor assigns, or work through the full set on your own. Each exercise is also a stepping-stone toward your Democracy Audit project.

Exercise 1 — Track a Current Bill

Go to Congress.gov (or GovTrack.us) and pick one bill currently before the 119th Congress that interests you. Choose something substantive, not a ceremonial measure (skip "naming a post office" bills and "Sense of Congress" resolutions). Good search strategies: filter by your home state's senators or representative as sponsor, search by subject area (health, immigration, taxation, education, housing), or browse the "Most Viewed Bills" list.

For your selected bill, write a 600–800-word memo addressing the following.

  1. Sponsor and cosponsors. Who introduced the bill? How many cosponsors does it have? What is the partisan breakdown of the cosponsors? (A bill with cosponsors from both parties is procedurally different — and politically different — from a bill with cosponsors from only one party.)
  2. Committee referral. To which committee or committees was the bill referred? Has it received a hearing? A markup? A committee report? If it is sitting in committee with no action, why might that be? (Hint: think about the chair's policy preferences and the leadership's agenda.)
  3. Status. What is the current status, in plain English? Has it passed either chamber? Is it under cloture? Is it in conference?
  4. Likely fate. Based on what you have learned in the chapter, what is the realistic chance this bill becomes law in the current Congress? What would need to happen procedurally for it to pass? If it is unlikely to pass, what is the bill actually accomplishing politically (messaging, building a record for the next Congress, signaling to constituencies)?

Be specific. "It will probably pass" or "it will probably die" without procedural reasoning is not an analysis. The point of the exercise is to translate procedural status into a political assessment.

Exercise 2 — Read a Rules Committee Report

The House Rules Committee posts every special rule it issues. Visit rules.house.gov and find a recent rule for a substantive bill (not a continuing resolution or a procedural bill). Read the rule itself (typically 2–6 pages) and the accompanying Rules Committee report.

Answer the following.

  1. What type of rule is it — open, structured, or closed?
  2. If structured, how many amendments were submitted? How many were made in order? Of those made in order, what was the partisan distribution of the amendment sponsors? Of those rejected, what does the pattern of rejection suggest about the Speaker's strategic considerations?
  3. How long is debate set to run? How is that time divided?
  4. Is a motion to recommit allowed? Under what conditions?
  5. Compare the rule to one issued by the opposing party in a recent prior Congress. (For example, if you read a rule from a Republican-majority House, also read a rule from a Democratic-majority House, or vice versa.) Are the rules systematically more permissive or more restrictive when one party is in the majority? Does the partisan label change the practice?

The point is to see how the Rules Committee actually structures floor debate, and to compare practice across majorities. The empirical claim "both parties have used closed and structured rules increasingly" should be testable from your own reading.

Exercise 3 — Find a Recent Cloture Vote

The Senate publishes every cloture motion at senate.gov under "Senate Action on Cloture Motions." Pick a cloture vote from the past two years.

For your selected vote, identify:

  1. The bill or nomination at issue and its general policy area.
  2. The cloture margin — yes votes, no votes, and the result.
  3. The partisan breakdown. Did any senators cross the aisle? If so, who, and why might they have done so?
  4. The political context. What was happening in the news cycle around this vote? What was the leadership of the majority party trying to accomplish? What was the minority leadership trying to accomplish?
  5. The aftermath. If cloture was invoked, did the bill or nomination subsequently pass? If cloture failed, what happened to the underlying matter?

Bonus question: did this vote use the legislative cloture threshold (60), or the post-2013/2017 nominations threshold (51)? For some categories of business this is a substantive distinction; understanding which threshold applied is part of reading the vote.

Exercise 4 — Steel-Manning the Filibuster Debate

This exercise asks you to make the strongest version of two opposing positions, regardless of which one you actually hold.

Part A. Write a 300–400-word argument for retaining the filibuster in something close to its current form. Take the position seriously. Use real arguments — not strawmen. Cite the institutional-protection rationale, the consensus-forcing rationale, the protection-for-numerical-minorities rationale, and any others you find compelling. You may cite specific senators (Manchin, McConnell, Sinema, others) who have made these arguments in their own words.

Part B. Write a 300–400-word argument for ending or significantly weakening the filibuster. Take that position equally seriously. Use real arguments — the silent-filibuster transformation, the disconnect between the modern filibuster and the original procedural design, the over-channeling of legislation through reconciliation, the population-asymmetry argument. Cite specific senators (Schumer, Warren, others) who have made these arguments.

Part C (one paragraph). Now identify which of these two arguments you find more persuasive on balance, and why — being honest about what features of your background, your political commitments, or your current information state are likely shaping your judgment. The point of this part is not to pick the "right" answer; it is to think critically about how your own position has been formed.

The grading rubric for this exercise is symmetric: a 5-out-of-5 Part A is one a thoughtful reform advocate would call a fair statement of their opponents' position. A 5-out-of-5 Part B is one a thoughtful retention advocate would call a fair statement of their opponents' position. If you find yourself unable to write a strong version of either, that is a signal that your own thinking on this question is not yet complete.

Exercise 5 — Reconciliation Tracking

Pick one major piece of legislation that passed through reconciliation in the past twenty-five years: the 2001 Bush tax cuts (EGTRRA), the 2010 ACA reconciliation sidecar, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the 2021 American Rescue Plan, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or another. Write a 500-word analysis covering:

  1. What the bill did substantively.
  2. Why reconciliation was used (was the alternative — 60 votes — available?).
  3. What Byrd Rule constraints shaped the bill's design. (For example, the TCJA sunset on individual tax rates was a Byrd Rule artifact; the ARP minimum-wage drop was a Byrd Rule ruling. Identify the parallel for your bill.)
  4. Whether you think the use of reconciliation was procedurally appropriate, given the original purpose of the reconciliation process and the policy effects of the bill. Argue your position with reference to the Byrd Rule rationale and the modern transformation of the Senate.

Exercise 6 — Democracy Audit: Your Representative's Committee Work

This is the chapter's contribution to your ongoing Democracy Audit project.

Identify your House representative's full committee assignments (including subcommittees). Then, for each committee:

  1. List the three most significant bills (in your judgment, based on news coverage and policy effect) that the committee has reported in the current Congress.
  2. For each bill, identify whether your representative was a sponsor, cosponsor, or neither.
  3. For any markup that received public coverage, identify whether your representative offered amendments. If so, what were they? Were they accepted, rejected, or withdrawn?
  4. Identify two votes by your representative on committee-reported bills where the vote was close or politically charged. Explain how he or she voted and what reasoning your representative gave (look at official press statements, floor remarks, social-media explanations).

This is the foundation for tracking your representative throughout the rest of the textbook. By the end of the book, you will have built a substantial profile of your representative's legislative work, voting record, and political posture.

Exercise 7 — Read a Bill You Disagree With

Pick a bill on a topic you care about, but pick the version of the bill from the other side of the political spectrum from your own views. (If you support stronger climate-change legislation, read a bill rolling back EPA regulations. If you support tighter immigration enforcement, read a path-to-citizenship bill. If you support gun-rights expansion, read a background-check bill. Whatever it is, pick the side you would not normally read carefully.)

Read the bill itself (most are 50–500 pages; you may skim, but identify each substantive section). Write a 500-word memo identifying:

  1. The bill's central policy mechanism. What does it actually do?
  2. The strongest argument for the bill, in the words its sponsors and supporters would use.
  3. The most significant concerns about the bill, in the words its opponents would use.
  4. One thing the bill does or proposes that you had not previously known about.

The point is to get used to reading legislation written from a perspective you don't share. Members of Congress have to read both kinds. You should too.

Exercise 8 — Map the Five-Committee Origin of the ACA

Using public-domain material (Congress.gov, the Library of Congress's THOMAS archive, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation's ACA legislative history, and contemporary news coverage from 2009–2010), reconstruct in chart form the path of the Affordable Care Act through its five committees of jurisdiction.

For each committee — House Energy and Commerce, House Ways and Means, House Education and Labor, Senate HELP, Senate Finance — identify:

  1. The chair (and ranking member) at the time.
  2. The dates of hearings, markups, and committee reports.
  3. The most contested provision the committee handled and how it was resolved.
  4. The vote in committee on reporting the bill (with partisan breakdown).

Then write a 400-word narrative tracing how the five committee texts were merged into a single House composite (H.R. 3962) and a single Senate substitute to H.R. 3590. Identify which provisions changed substantially between committee reporting and floor passage, and identify which compromises were forced by the need to assemble 60 votes for cloture in the Senate.

The point of this exercise is to see, concretely, how five different committee processes produced what eventually became a single law — and how leadership coordination across those processes was the actual locus of legislative drafting.

Exercise 9 — Compare the ACA and TCJA Reconciliation Paths

Using the two case studies for this chapter, write a 500-word comparison addressing the following.

  1. What did the ACA's reconciliation sidecar (H.R. 4872, 2010) and the TCJA (H.R. 1, 2017) have in common procedurally? What did they differ on?
  2. How did the Byrd Rule shape each bill's substantive design? Identify two specific design choices in each that were Byrd Rule artifacts.
  3. The TCJA passed in roughly fifty days from chairman's mark to presidential signature. The ACA reconciliation effort took over a year (and the underlying ACA effort took longer still). What accounts for the difference?
  4. Looking at both cases together, what does the use of reconciliation tell us about the modern Senate? About the relationship between procedural rules and substantive policy?

This exercise consolidates the comparative work that the two case studies set up. It is also a good preparation for any class discussion on filibuster reform — the strongest arguments on each side reference the substantive consequences of how reconciliation has channeled major legislation.

A Note on the Democracy Audit

Several of these exercises feed into your Democracy Audit project, which builds across the textbook. Save your work; by the end of the course, you will have built a substantial portfolio on your representative, your senators, and the legislative process as it actually affects your district.