Instructions for Friday, April 11

by admin - April 10th, 2014

No, I am not here this morning (you can follow the meeting I’m attending at Twitter hashtag #oah2014). Yes, we are still having class.

This was going to be a working Congress day anyway, you will hardly miss me.

Here’s what to do:
• Sit in your usual committees.
• Open your laptops and navigate to the Day7 page and read the instructions.
• Take attendance and someone email it to me.

Use the 50 minutes productively to do as much of the following as you can:

• In committees, conduct some online research and brief each other/brainstorm issues and pieces of legislation your real-life committee has dealt with since the 1980s. This could include learning about any bills that your Committee has recently held hearings on, or is in markup, or have reported this year. You can find that out from your committee’s page (remember some committees are in both House and Senate) or from OpenCongress.org

• Familiarize yourself with the basics of a bill’s parts, as explained on the Congress Wiki page for today

• Begin drafting either a bill or a resolution (there’s a downloadable template on the Wiki). Everyone should draft his/her own bill or joint resolution, or at most co-sponsor with one other person. The co-sponsor does not have to be on your committee.

• Update your Committee Wiki page to reflect what you learned about the real-life committee’s actual recent work and priorities, or what you think your committee should focus on in our Congress.

Your bills are all due to me by midnight, Wed April 23 so I can get them in “the hopper” for debate in our final two legislative sessions.

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