Bills vs. Laws: The Legislative Journey in the United States

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A bill is a legislative proposal before Congress. It can become a law only after the House and the Senate both pass it and it is presented to the president.

House members can vote to approve a bill, only for the Senate to amend it or prevent a final vote. A report that a bill “passed” may therefore describe only one step, with the text still under negotiation and the president’s decision still ahead.

A bill can pass a vote without becoming law

The Constitution requires a bill passed by the House and Senate to be presented to the president before it becomes law. Committee approval, House passage and Senate passage are steps along the way. None of them alone turns the proposal into a law, so a bill that has passed one vote is still only a proposal.

Congress also votes on resolutions, and whether one can become law depends on its type. Joint resolutions ordinarily become law in the same manner as bills, but those proposing constitutional amendments go to the states rather than the president. Concurrent resolutions require both chambers and simple resolutions concern one chamber, but neither has the force of law or requires the president’s signature.

Who writes a bill, and who introduces it

Legislative ideas and proposed drafts can come from lawmakers, constituents acting individually or through citizen groups, and state legislatures.

Members and their staffs typically consult nonpartisan attorneys in each chamber’s Legislative Counsel office to turn policy proposals into legislative language. The House Office of the Legislative Counsel works with members and committees to express their policy preferences in clear, legally effective language, on a confidential and impartial basis.

Advocacy organizations and other interest groups can supply lawmakers with policy information and analysis, as well as drafts of bills and amendments. Party leaders coordinate the consideration of major bills, and standing committees supply much of the policy expertise for developing and assessing legislation. The words of a bill therefore reflect policy choices by lawmakers, informed by staff and outside analysis and shaped by the priorities of the coalitions trying to enact them.

In the House, the member who introduces a bill is its primary sponsor, and other members who sign on in support are cosponsors. House members can introduce legislation electronically or by dropping it in the hopper, a wooden box on the House floor, while senators submit it to clerks on the Senate floor. Outside groups can supply proposals, but an outside draft is not itself a bill formally introduced in Congress.

House bills carry the prefix H.R., while Senate bills carry S., followed by a number. Bills raising revenue must originate in the House, although the Senate may propose or agree to amendments.

Committees decide which proposals move forward

An introduced bill is typically referred to the committee or committees with jurisdiction over its subject. At a hearing, committee members hear witnesses’ views; during markup, members consider and vote on changes to the bill. Committees receive more bills than they can pursue in detail, and the chair has the chief authority to choose which issues receive hearings or markup.

A committee agrees by majority vote to report a bill to its chamber, with any changes recommended during markup. In the House, a committee cannot report a measure or recommendation unless a majority of its members is actually present. In short, a bill gets out of a House committee by a majority vote, taken with a majority of the committee’s members present.

Under the House’s discharge procedure, a majority of the total membership must sign a motion to discharge a committee before it is entered on the discharge calendar. A discharge motion asks the House to take a measure out of a committee’s hands. This offers a route to seek action despite a committee bottleneck, but collecting the signatures is a procedural step, not passage of the bill.

House and Senate passage are separate hurdles

Most bills the House considers come up under a procedure called suspension of the rules, which limits debate to 40 minutes, prohibits floor amendments and requires two-thirds of members voting to agree. The two-thirds threshold is the price of that streamlined route, not a requirement for every House bill.

Many major bills pass the House by a simple majority, with a quorum required for conducting business. A special rule, a resolution the House adopts for a particular bill, can identify the text to be considered, set debate time and limit which floor amendments may be offered.

The Senate generally allows wide-ranging debate and amendments, and a numerical majority cannot end debate on most questions by itself. A filibuster is action designed to prolong debate and delay or prevent a vote. A bill backed by more senators than oppose it can therefore still fail to reach a final vote.

For ordinary legislation, cloture, the procedure for ending debate, requires three-fifths of senators duly chosen and sworn. In a full Senate, that means 60 of its 100 members, because the count is of all senators duly chosen and sworn, not only those who vote. Once cloture is agreed to, further consideration of the bill is limited to 30 hours, after which a separate final vote on the bill requires only a simple majority. The vice president may break a tie in the Senate.

The Senate can also use unanimous-consent agreements to set tailored limits on debate and amendments. Such an agreement is a plan for handling a measure that takes effect only if no senator objects. That gives senators another way to agree on how to reach a decision without treating every bill as a filibuster contest.

Both chambers must agree on the same text

Both chambers must pass the same bill, not two separate bills with identical text. At some point the Senate must take up the House bill or the House must take up the Senate bill.

When one chamber changes the other’s bill, the chambers may exchange amendments and counterproposals until one agrees to the other’s proposal. A conference committee is a temporary committee appointed to negotiate a proposal both chambers can accept. A conference report cannot be amended on the floor, and both chambers must agree to it.

Two labels on a bill’s official copies mark how far it has come. An engrossed House bill is the official copy as passed by the House, including its floor amendments, certified before being sent to the Senate. An enrolled bill is the final official copy passed by both chambers in identical form, prepared for presentation to the president. Enrolled therefore means both chambers have passed the same text. It does not mean the president has acted or that the bill is law.

The president has choices, but not a line-item veto

If the president approves a bill, the president signs it. If the president disapproves, the bill returns with objections to the chamber where it originated. That return is a veto: it sends the decision back to Congress rather than rewriting the bill.

Congress can override a veto if the originating chamber and then the other chamber each approve the bill by two-thirds. The president cannot use a line-item veto to reject selected provisions while approving the rest of a bill.

If the president does not return a bill within 10 days after it is presented, not counting Sundays, it becomes law as if signed, unless Congress’s adjournment prevents its return. When adjournment prevents return, the unsigned bill does not become law. The exception turns on whether adjournment prevents return, not simply whether lawmakers are away from Washington.

How to tell whether a proposal is law

A bill not enacted by the end of the two-year Congress in which it was introduced dies and must be reintroduced in the next Congress. Progress on an old proposal is useful history, but it should not be confused with the status of a newly introduced version.

Start with the bill’s record on Congress.gov’s legislation search, using the Congress and bill number together. The Library of Congress’s public bill search publishes major-action updates and the different versions of a bill’s text. GovInfo also supplies published bill versions, including the enrolled version marked ENR. To confirm that a proposal became law, look for the enactment record, not a committee report or a chamber’s passage announcement.

On Congress.gov, a bill’s Actions tab links to House and Senate roll call votes. Voice votes and division or standing votes do not show by name how each member voted. Check what the vote was on: approval of an amendment or a procedural step is not the same question as final passage.

Most enacted laws are public laws, which affect society as a whole; private laws affect an individual, family or small group. An enacted measure receives a public or private law number, with the Congress number followed by the law’s sequence number. Its first official publication is a slip law, a separately published document whose heading includes the approval date and bill number. Slip laws are compiled into the Statutes at Large, the collection of laws for each congressional session.

The U.S. Code organizes general and permanent federal laws by subject, with amendments incorporated into the text. It compiles most public laws in force, rather than every enacted law. For an enactment outside the Code’s general and permanent scope, read the original slip law or its publication in the Statutes at Large.

A law ordinarily takes effect on its approval date or passage over a veto, unless it expressly provides a different effective date. Check the effective date separately from the date of enactment.

Congress passes laws under constitutional authority, while executive agencies issue regulations using authority delegated by Congress. A statute, meaning a law Congress passed, and a regulation can both bear on the same policy, but they come from different bodies and rest on different authority.

The House’s Find Your Representative service matches ZIP codes to congressional districts and links to members’ websites and contact pages. When contacting an office about a proposal, give the bill number and the text version at issue, and say what is being asked: introduce a proposal, support a pending version or change its language.