What The Rules Committee Is

What the Rules Committee is
The Committee on Rules, or more commonly, Rules Committee, is a committee of the United States House of Representatives. Rather than being responsible for a specific area of policy, as most other committees are, it is in charge of determining under what rule other bills will come to the floor. The Rules Committee is know as the traffic cop of the House of Representatives because virtually every major of legislation must come to the committee before it is considered on the House Floor. As such, it is one of the most powerful committees on the Hill. A rule is a simple resolution of the House of Representatives, usually reported by the Committee on Rules, to permit the immediate consideration of a legislative measure, not withstanding the usual order of business, and to prescribe conditions for its debate and amendment. The authority of the Rules Committee to report special rules can be traced to 1883 (Bach). Prior to that time, bills could not be considered out of their order on the calendars of the House except by unanimous consent or under a suspension of the rules, which required a two-thirds vote. Since special rules reported from the Rules Committee required only a majority vote in the House, the new practice greatly facilitated the ability of the majority leadership to depart from the regular order of business and schedule major legislation according to the majority's priorities (Bach).
When a committee reports a bill, it is placed at the bottom of one of the House Calendars. Considering the order and the amount of bills, this makes little sense for effective policy making. Thus the House developed a way of getting legislation to the floor much faster. The current ways of getting legislation to the floor are through a suspension of the rules and through special rules from the Rules Committee (Sinclair). Noncontroversial legislation is usually under suspension but the motion to suspend rules is in order on Mondays through Wednesdays (Sinclair). Legislation under this procedure are debated for a maximum of forty minutes, no amendments are allowed, and two-thirds vote is required for passage. Legislation that is far more complicated may also be considered under suspension of the rules. This occurs when a bill is so broadly supported that using much floor time is useless (Sinclair). The two-thirds passage requirement also gives the minority party one of its few points of leverage under House rules by using the suspension procedure. The minority can inconvenience the majority by approving bills under the suspension procedure however, the majority can counter the minority’s suspension by a special rule (Sinclair).