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Saturday, July 05, 2025

Whither Conference Committees?

Gerard N. Magliocca

I have a civics question about the budget bill. The House passed a budget. The Senate amended that budget. Then the House was told that they must enact the Senate budget as is or else.

Now there used to be a thing called a "conference committee" that reconciled House and Senate bills. Then each chamber would vote on the reconciled version. Perhaps this was never the practice for the budget reconciliation process (forgive my ignorance if that is so). But my sense is that for high-profile legislation the function of the conference committee is now performed by the majority party's leaders in each chamber. This is not a healthy development, especially for back-benchers. 


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