Thousands of bills are introduced in both of the chambers of the United States Congress each new term. It is a lot easier to kill a bill than to get it passed. Around 90% of them are killed one way or another in fact. This is because there are so many different opportunities for it to happen. All of the opportunities fall under three categories, which are: amending, pigeonholing, and defeating.
If a bill is considered by a house committee or subcommittee to be unwise or unnecessary, they can pigeonhole it. Pigeonholing refers to the killing of a bill by a Congressional committee when it refuses to vote on whether the bill goes for consideration to the House of Representatives or the Senate. The committee chairman has the authority to pigeonhole a bill. Pigeonholing is the most frequent way that bills are killed. .
Another tactic is amending a bill. If a bill is changed around so much that the person who introduced it into Congress, then it is considered to have been killed. The amendment process takes place on the house floor. Amendments can either be small things like typographical changes, or they can be major. If a person wants the bill to be held up and cause people to lost interest in seeing the bill passed on, then this tactic is the way to have it done. The person can keep making petty little changes to waste time, keeping the bill from moving on in the process.
The last way to choose from is simply defeat the bill. This can happen at all three steps of the process of a bill becoming a law. At the committee level, either a committee or subcommittee can come up with a majority vote to kill the proposed bill. The same happens at the next level, which are one and then the other house of Congress. If the bill reaches the Executive branch, the President of the United States is pretty much the last person to decide whether or not the bill becomes law. He can do two things. One thing he can do is veto the bill, which is to simply refuse to sign it into law and send it back to where it came from in Congress.
