Why does Congress reject more legislation than it passes?

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Why does Congress reject more legislation than it passes?

One of Congress’ primary functions is to act as the legislative office; passing bills and making laws however, due to the incredible difficulty of passing legislation in the US system only 3% of over 10,000 bills are passed a year. The process of passing bills in Congress is so difficult that it has been called a “legislative labyrinth” by some political analysts.

It must be remembered that the legislative process was made deliberately complicated in order to prevent poor legislation from being passed. First of all after bills must go through Committee stage, many bills “die in committee”, committees are set up in order to scrutinise bills in details before they go through congress, committees generally make or suggest minor changes to the bill before passing it although most bills never make it through committee stage as such the Committee has become known as the burial ground. Committees exist in both the Senate and the House of Representatives so any differences later need to be reconciled in a Conference Committee however this can be a lengthy process so often a compromise is simply worked out between the two chambers by each chamber agreeing to make changes until compromise is reached this is known as ping-ponging and is far quicker. Many bills do not even make it to Committee stage instead they are deprioritised and pigeon holed with no further action taken on them.

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If a bill passes through the Committee stage then it must then pass through a second reading, in the Senate there is a high possibility of a filibuster taking place, a filibuster is essentially an action taken to outtalk a bill preventing it from being passed, in 1957 Strom Thurmond famously conducted a filibuster against the civil rights movement lasting for over a day and in more recent years in 2007 a group of Republican senators got together to filibuster  the 2008 Defence Appropriations bill.

The difficulty of passing a bill through both houses concurrently also means that less ...

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