Talk:Procedures of the United States House of Representatives

Collaboration of the Week

• I nominated this article to be a WikiProject Congress Collaboration of the Week. Please see what you can do to help expand this article! Thanks. --Daysleeper47 13:22, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Original Article Text

I have included the original text of the article before I edited it below:

The parliamentary procedure of the House of Representatives is determined internally. Historical basis for the procedures comes from Jefferson's Manual of Parliamentary Practice although at the start of each Congress a new set of rules is approved by the membership.

Among the distinctive features of House rules is the powerful Committee on Rules which approves the amount and format of debate for a bill and the amendments to the bill which will and will not be allowed. Also powerful is the Committee on Appropriations which is responsible for the federal budget. Edward Lalone 03:52, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Changes

I made some major changes to the article and would like to hear people's opinions about the articles subject matter. I think that focus should be given to the general rules of the House, and to Floor and Committee Rules as these will be most interesting to people. I think we should avoid the mundane and the redundant and focus more on general procedural rules so people can understand what they are seeing when they listen to and watch the House on television, radio, etc. I will continue to make changes and would request that if you object to a change I have made that you post it here as I will if I object to any changes you make instead of reverting edits. This will help this article develop in a positive way. I took out a reference to the Committee on Appropriations and Rules because I think we could re-work these to be more stream-lined with the article and couldn't think of a way to re-work that part to go with the flow of the article. I considered a section on Important Committees as I think that may help people, but we would also have to include the Ways and Means which is a very powerful committee. Edward Lalone 03:52, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Merger proposals

Merger to United States House of Representatives

In my opinon I think the best thing to do would be to merge this article with the United States House of Representatives page Please respond back. --Zonerocks 05:21, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

• I think we should actually make the bigger article here. This can be a very detailed topic if someone did the research. --Daysleeper47 19:18, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
  • I agree with you. This is a very detailed topic that should be addressed in a way that people can understand the House Rules of Procedures. There is a lot of misunderstanding out there about how the House works and the legislative process in general and I think this article will clear up a lot about what goes on and allow for people to become more involved in the democratic process. Even understanding the Committee system would assist people in knowing who to contact about an important issue. Edward Lalone 03:57, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
• [Oppose Merge] I think this article has great potential of helping people to understand how the House conducts its proceedings, and the length of an article on the Procedures of the U.S. House being a part of the main U.S. House article would create length problems. Most people who read the U.S. House article don't care about House Procedures and it is for this reason that I think this article should not be merged with the United States House of Representatives page. Edward Lalone 03:57, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
• Oppose The article is best as is: as a content fork summarized at United States House of Representatives. -Rrius (talk) 00:13, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Merger from Standing Rules of the United States House of Representatives

Why is the article on "Standing Rules" distinct and separate from this article?—Markles 17:00, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

• Support The article seems to have been created due to a misguided sense that any article pertaining to one house must be balanced by an equivalent for the other house. In this case, the article was copied from Standing Rules of the United States Senate, with "Senate" and "Senator" replaced throughout. I've removed a lot of the information that was Senate-specific and tweaked the rest. For instance, the discussion of closed sessions did not reflect House practice, and I didn't wish to research it enough to replace the text. In essence, what remains is a brief treatment of debate in the House. There is no good reason that discussion can't be merged into this article. There is also a discussion to merge self-executing rule into the standing rules article. I'm not sure we want to deal with that. -Rrius (talk) 00:10, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

References?

Where's the references/sources for this article?!?!?!?!