Executive Summary Change the Rules to Give Substantial
Bipartisan Majorities Greater Access to the Floor
- Improve the discharge petition, giving petition
filers the option to collect signatures privately
and setting the threshold to a majority of
sitting members
• Improve the consensus calendar, closing
loopholes in the rule and thus ensuring that
bills that reach 290 cosponsors receive
floor votes
• Create a new procedure, Guaranteed Regular
Order, empowering committees to advance
important bipartisan legislation – particularly
on reauthorizations – to the floor if they
conduct a thorough deliberative process
including hearings and markups
• Require consideration of bipartisan
amendments with 10 cosponsors from
each party.
Make Committees Stronger, More
Substantive, and More Effective
• Reduce member conf licts through block
scheduling and a mandatory deconflicting tool,
and then publish member attendance
• Promote alternative hearing setups to further
inquiry rather than adversarial position-taking
• Enhance staff professionalization by reducing
turnover, with partisan balance of 60-40
instead of 2-1
• Give subcommittee chairs control over hiring at
least one staffer - Give committee members the chance to weigh in in on chairs and ranking members, by holding a secret advisory vote before selection is made by party steering committee
- Give Members More Time for Legislative Work
- • Fix the House calendar, giving members more time for sustained attention to issues by increasing the number of five-day work-weeks per session
- Promote Bipartisan Collaborations
- Promote relationships across party lines, providing more resources for bipartisan retreats, lunches, educational sessions, codels, and staffdels, and providing physical space near the House floor reserved for members of both parties
- • Promote conference committees
- Raise Member Pay
- • Raise Congressional salaries, which have stagnated and lagged executive branch pay.