In
parliamentary procedure
Parliamentary procedure is the accepted rules, ethics, and customs governing meetings of an assembly or organization. Its object is to allow orderly deliberation upon questions of interest to the organization and thus to arrive at the sense ...
, a substitute amendment is an
amendment An amendment is a formal or official change made to a law, contract, constitution, or other legal document. It is based on the verb to amend, which means to change for better. Amendments can add, remove, or update parts of these agreements. The ...
that replaces a portion or all of the wording in a proposal.
Legislatures
In
legislatures
A legislature is an assembly with the authority to make laws for a political entity such as a country or city. They are often contrasted with the executive and judicial powers of government.
Laws enacted by legislatures are usually known a ...
, a substitute amendment kills a bill by replacing it if the amendment is passed.
Legislative bodies sometimes have special rules regarding this type of amendment. For example, the
Continental Congress had a rule stating: "No new motion or proposition shall be admitted under color of amendment as a substitute for a question or proposition under debate until it is postponed or disagreed to."
United States Congress
In the
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washing ...
, substitute amendments are often used to replace the text of a bill that is no longer being considered with the text of an unrelated bill. In this case, it is said that the former bill is being used as a legislative vehicle for the latter. This has the effect of skipping steps of the legislative process, such as the need for a bill to be passed by a
Congressional committee
A congressional committee is a legislative sub-organization in the United States Congress that handles a specific duty (rather than the general duties of Congress). Committee membership enables members to develop specialized knowledge of the ...
. This is possible because there is no general requirement that amendments offered by senators on the floor must be germane or relevant to the bill being considered.
Other assemblies
In other
deliberative assemblies
A deliberative assembly is a meeting of members who use parliamentary procedure.
Etymology
In a speech to the electorate at Bristol in 1774, Edmund Burke described the British Parliament as a "deliberative assembly," and the expression became the ...
, using
Robert's Rules of Order
''Robert's Rules of Order'', often simply referred to as ''Robert's Rules'', is a manual of parliamentary procedure by U.S. Army officer Henry Martyn Robert.
"The object of Rules of Order is to assist an assembly to accomplish the work for whic ...
, a substitute amendment is a form of the
motion to amend. It could be
debated, modified, and voted on like other amendments.
A substitute can be a sentence, paragraph, section, or article within a
motion
In physics, motion is the phenomenon in which an object changes its position with respect to time. Motion is mathematically described in terms of displacement, distance, velocity, acceleration, speed and frame of reference to an observer and m ...
or
resolution
Resolution(s) may refer to:
Common meanings
* Resolution (debate), the statement which is debated in policy debate
* Resolution (law), a written motion adopted by a deliberative body
* New Year's resolution, a commitment that an individual mak ...
, or it can be the entire motion or resolution.
It could be used to improve a poorly worded motion or resolution which helps to pass it.
Procedure
When a substitute is proposed, both the substitute and the wording of the motion that is being substituted for are considered.
In this case, the substitute could be amended and the original motion could be amended.
Then a vote is taken on whether to put the substitute (with any modifications) in place of the original motion (with any modifications).
This makes it fair for the proponents of the original motion (if only the substitute could be considered and passed, then the proponents of the original motion wouldn't get a chance to advocate and possibly improve their motion if that was the case).
If the substitute amendment passed, the main motion as amended would still need to be voted on.
See also
*
Shell bill
Shell may refer to:
Architecture and design
* Shell (structure), a thin structure
** Concrete shell, a thin shell of concrete, usually with no interior columns or exterior buttresses
** Thin-shell structure
Science Biology
* Seashell, a hard o ...
*
Amend (motion)
In parliamentary procedure, the motion to amend is used to modify another motion. An amendment could itself be amended. A related procedure is filling blanks in a motion.
Explanation and use
Using Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised (RONR), al ...
References
{{Parliamentary Procedure
Subsidiary motions