Summary of Unorthodox Lawmaking by Barbara Sinclair
Uploaded by jamie83 on Oct 26, 2011
This essay summarizes Barbara Sinclair’s book about Congress, and in particular, how changes within Congress have changed the ways laws are made.
Barbara Sinclair wrote her book because, as she says, “… the gap between the legislative process that I observe on Capitol Hill and the legislative process described in U.S. government textbooks has become a chasm.” (P. xiii). Her book explains how the legislative process actually works, as opposed to how it used to work. The contrast is both interesting and disheartening.
In order to show how the process works, Sinclair compares two versions of Clean Air legislation, one passed in 1970 and the other in 1990; highlights the differences between the bills, and explains the processes used to get them through Congress; she also questions the validity of the compromises used to get the bills passed.
She also traces (in general) the path of a bill from its introduction to enactment, beginning in the House and continuing through the Senate. She illuminates the reconciliation process that takes place as the two versions of the bill are debated and reworked into a suitable compromise piece of legislation, one that will pass both houses of Congress.
She also deals with the budget, a huge, on-going wrangle that now threatens to paralyze the nation and put us in debt for generations to come. But perhaps her most important work is the chapter in which she analyzes the changes that have occurred in the legislative process, and the reasons for those changes. Since it is possible to consider the book as a history of various pieces of legislation, and since a paper this brief doesn’t permit an examination of how certain bills became law, I’d like to use the remaining space to discuss the “heart” of the book: why the process has changed so dramatically.
Sinclair says that three major trends played a part in changing the legislative process from the “textbook” one we know from our civics classes (ideally: introduce a bill in the House; send it to committee; debate it; vote on and pass it; send it to the Senate where it again goes to committee; debate it; pass it; sign it into law) to the often hostile and difficult process we have today. The three factors that changed the way laws are made are: 1) “…internal reform that changed the distribution of influence in...