Reference no: EM132268567

Preparing for the Congressional Simulation and Write-Up

Ravl Labrador is my representative.

Getting Ready: Research Your Congressional Representative (Length-1-2 Pages)

You should know several things about yourdistrict which may be pertinent to the bill being discussed. For example...

• What is the partisan make-up of the district? Given the partisan composition, will you be rewarded for voting for the bill?

• What is the racial make-up of your district? How does the racial/ethnic composition of your district and its' location influence how you should vote on this bill?

• Does it appear that your representatives strongly supports law enforcements? Do they have a section on their page recognizing law enforcement? If so how might this affect their vote?

• Where does your financial support come from? Would your financial backers want you to support the bill or oppose it and why?

• How has your representative voted on similar bills in the past? Is there a precedent of them supporting or opposing similar legislation?

In this section, you should address all of the following areas and describe how you arrived at your decision to support or oppose the bill.
This work should be completed before the committee hearing.

Part 1: Committee Hearing and Mark-Up (Part 1)

In the Committee Hearing, the first step is to elect a chair. The chair of the committee has the important task of deciding who testifies and can determine the order of questioning (however, the rule generally is that questions go back and forth between Democrats and Republicans). The chair is also asked to make an opening statement about the bill and to keep time to ensure that no representative takes more than the allotted time.

To prepare for questioning the representative should first familiarize themselves with the expert witnesses to better understand what questions are most relevant to each witness.

Representatives should use the committee hearings to ask questions of the experts about how the proposed bill may influence their district and their constituents. It is not uncommon for representatives at this stage to ask tough questions so they can broadcast their work on the committee to increase opportunities for re-election.

In this section, representatives have to come up with at least 2 questions that they would ask each of the witnesses. These questions should be pertinent both to the experts' areas of work (based on research on their website) as well as important to your constituents. After writing down these questions, you should provide 3-5 sentences explaining how you developed each question and what you hoped to achieve from asking the question.

Following the questioning there will be a mark-up session in committee....

The goal of the markup session is to have the committee make the bill stronger before it is presented on the house floor.

The committee chair begins this session by describing the bill, reading the bill, and then discussing how they would like to organize the markup of the bill (i.e. who should speak first, whether amendments should be added, how much time will be devoted to the markup of the bill). The committee chairs job is to recognize colleagues who wish to speak and strike down amendments to the bill which they feel are not pertinent to the bill. The committee chair calls for a vote for each suggested modification and calls for a vote for the final markup of the bill.

In general, the chair goes through each provision of the bill and asks members to comment on it. All changes to the bill must be voted on by the committee.

In this section, the committee members must think of at least two improvements to the bill. These improvements may include striking portions of the bill or may be adding sections. These improvements must be based on the premise that your specific changes to the bill with either help the bill pass/fail (depending on your preference) or will help your constituents. In addition to selecting two changes to the bill, representatives must also justify why they are asking for these changes in about 3-5 sentences.

This work should be completed before the committee hearing.

Part 2: Floor Debate

During the floor debate, representatives have one last opportunity to influence the bill or to sway their colleagues to support or oppose the bill. The instructor will play the role of the Speaker of the House and will determine the rules of the legislation (which will in all likelihood be closed for amendments). For this particular bill, representatives who wish to speak will ask for the chair to yield 1 minute to the representative. Representatives will then have one minute to make their case for or against the bill.

Student should turn in about a page description of their prepared remarks for the floor. However, not everyone will have to give a speech.
Following the speech, we will vote on the bill.