They are electing a particular Congress, which lasts two years. So through and , the th U. Congress has been making laws.
For and , the th U. Congress will be in office. The adjournment sine die typically concludes each annual session. Today, the length of the recess following sine die adjournment is not much different from a recess following an adjournment to a day certain which is when the Congress sets a particular date to return.
In years past, Congress met for only a few months out of the year, and a recess following upon a sine die adjournment could last for months. In current practice, Congress often meets in Washington through much of December, and even as late as Christmas Eve in rare circumstances. Thus, the recess could be only a week or two, which is a much shorter period than its traditional August recess.
The sine die adjournment has several implications for the legislative process. Matters irrelevant to the question may be debated, thus providing a valued opportunity for private Members to raise matters of concern to them. The Speaker may adjourn the House to the next sitting without putting the question under the following circumstances:. A further exception relates to the situation when the House is informed by the Clerk of the absence of the Speaker, the Deputy Speaker and Second Deputy Speaker.
If the House does not proceed immediately to elect a Member to perform the duties of the Speaker, the House stands adjourned until the next sitting. Debate on the motion cannot be adjourned. As with other motions the reply of the mover closes the debate. The motion for the adjournment has been withdrawn, by leave, to allow the presentation of a committee report, [] and to allow a motion for the alteration of the hour of next meeting to be moved. When the legislation had not arrived some four hours later, the motion was withdrawn, by leave, and a motion granting leave of absence to all Members and a special adjournment motion were agreed to.
A further adjournment motion was then moved and agreed to. Even in this situation, it seems clear that if the 10 days expire after the expiration of the term of office of the Congress on January 3 of an odd-numbered year , the President can pocket veto the bill. In this case, Congress has definitively "by their Adjournment prevent[ed]" the return of the bill, because the only Congress that could be in session on the date when the 10 days expire cannot be the one that passed the bill, but rather its successor.
It is also accepted, however, that the President may sign a bill into law at any time within the allotted day period, even if the date of signing falls after the expiration of the term of the Congress. The remaining possibility is that the 10 days expire after the final sine die adjournment of the Congress, but before the expiration of its term of office.
On the face of the matter, it would appear that a bill that remains without presidential action at that point would be pocket vetoed, inasmuch as, even if the President returned the measure to Congress, the Congress that enacted it would never thereafter be present to act on the veto.
In contemporary practice, however, as noted earlier, resolutions providing for a sine die adjournment usually also authorize the leadership to reconvene Congress if circumstances require. If Congress were to reconvene under either authority, it could be argued that its previous adjournment had in no sense had the effect of preventing the President from returning a bill with his objections, and therefore that any bill remaining unsigned at the end of the applicable 10 days had not been pocket vetoed, but had become law.
To address such uncertainties, Presidents sometimes return bills to Congress with their objections even after a sine die adjournment, accompanied by a memorandum asserting that the bill should be regarded as not having become law even if it had not been returned. This procedure has come to be known as a "protective return veto. A "lame duck session" of Congress is any portion of an annual session that occurs after the election for the next Congress has already taken place in November of an even-numbered year , but before the following January 3, when the term of office of that newly elected Congress begins.
During a lame duck session, accordingly, the Congress that meets is not the Congress that has just been elected, for its term of office has not yet begun, but instead the Congress that is coming to a close, because its term of office has not yet concluded, even though it still includes Members who are going to retire at the end of the Congress or have already been defeated for re-election.
Under contemporary conditions, a "lame duck session" is normally not a separate annual session of Congress, but simply the portion of the regular session already in being that occurs after the election day. It is not separately numbered as a session, but retains the number of the session that was previously meeting.
The annual session then normally adjourns sine die some time in December, although it has occasionally extended right up until the term of office of the Congress expires at noon on January 3. In recent times, when Congress has met in lame duck session, the post-election portion of the annual session has most often been separated from the pre-election portion by a recess of the session.
The terms of the concurrent resolution of adjournment have typically provided for this recess to begin about a month before the election and extend until a few days or weeks thereafter. In some cases, however, one or both chambers have taken no recess of the session over the period of the election, but instead have held pro forma sessions during that period.
In a few cases, as well, a chamber has taken a recess of the session during the election period, but has extended it at one or both ends by a series of pro forma sessions. The authority to reconvene Congress if circumstances warrant, which concurrent resolutions for a sine die adjournment now routinely accord to congressional leadership, provides another means by which lame duck sessions may occur.
When this authority has been used, its use has usually been foreseen at the time the adjournment resolution was adopted. In these circumstances it remains true that the previously existing annual session of Congress is regarded as resuming; the previous adjournment is treated as not having been a sine die adjournment after all. As explained earlier under " Annual Sessions of Congress ," if Congress were to recess its session during the election period, and the President exercised the constitutional authority to reconvene them in extraordinary session at a point after the election, but before the date set by the adjournment resolution, the previously existing session would still be regarded as resuming.
On the other hand, if the President exercised the authority in the same way after Congress had adjourned its session sine die, the sine die adjournment would still be regarded as having occurred, and the reconvening would be treated as beginning a new, separately numbered, extraordinary session of Congress. Another way in which a lame duck session could constitute a new, separately numbered, annual session of Congress would be realized if Congress adjourned sine die before the election after having exercised its constitutional authority to enact a law providing for an additional session to convene on a date after the election.
The Recess Appointments Clause of the Constitution provides that "the President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the end of their next Session. On the other hand, it has long been the general practice that for purposes of this clause, a "recess" can be either an intersession recess or an intrasession recess; that is, either a period of sine die adjournment or a recess of the session, as described earlier in the sections on " Adjournment Sine Die " and "Recess of the Session.
At issue, however, has been the extent to which the President can exercise this power during 1 the sine die adjournment of the Senate that is, an intersession recess ; 2 a "recess of the session" that is, an "adjournment for more than three days" or "intrasession recess" ; or 3 a period of pro forma sessions. In practice, it is clear that Presidents have frequently made recess appointments during intersession recesses of the Senate, and such action has seldom been challenged.
As the use of recess appointments evolved over time, it had sometimes been argued that "the Recess of the Senate," in the Recess Appointments Clause, should be understood to mean the same as the "adjourn[ment] for more than three days" mentioned in the Adjournments Clause.
In practice, however, Presidents until very recently appear to have made recess appointments during intrasession recesses of the Senate only when the recess would be at least 10 days long. These patterns suggested that the meaning of "recess" in the Recess Appointments Clause cannot simply be identified with that of "adjourn[ment] for more than three days" in the Adjournments Clause.
Some observers argued, nevertheless, that it is only in the Adjournments Clause that the Constitution appears to offer any potential guidance on what may constitute a "recess" for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause. On this basis, these observers suggested that the three-day standard of the Adjournments Clause constitutes at least a minimum length requisite for exercise of the recess appointment power, at least during an intrasession recess. Pro forma sessions could achieve this effect, however, only on the presumption that the recess appointment power is not available in an adjournment or "recess" of the Senate for three days or less.
In other words, unless "recess" is held to have the same meaning in context of the Recess Appointments Clause as "adjourn" in the Adjournments Clause, scheduling a series of pro forma sessions to occur every few days would seem irrelevant for purposes of preventing recess appointments.
In January, , the Office of Legal Counsel OLC issued a memorandum on recess appointments in which it did not reject this three-day standard but proposed that the President might determine the parameters of a "recess for recess appointment clause purposes, based on when the Senate is 'not in session' for the appointment of officers.
This view of the matter raised the question of whether the Senate might properly be described as being "in recess" for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause even when holding pro forma sessions every few days. The January OLC opinion made a number of arguments in favor of this proposition, for example, that Senators and Senate sources sometimes refer to a period of pro forma sessions as a "recess," 66 even though it is not a "recess of the session" in the sense specified earlier in this report, nor is any interval between pro forma sessions considered a "recess of the session" for purposes of the Adjournments Clause.
The opinion argued that a "recess" sufficient for the purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause may in fact occur during such periods when the Senate predetermines that no business will occur during the pro forma sessions. By this argument, although pro forma sessions with no business transpiring may be sufficient to satisfy the Adjournments Clause, they are not sufficient to prevent a recess appointment.
In , however, the U. Noel Canning , where it concluded that the President's recess appointments to the NLRB were constitutionally infirm on the grounds that the Senate was in an intrasession recess of only three days, a period of time it deemed too short to trigger the recess appointment power.
It determined that perhaps except in "very unusual circumstances" a recess of "more than 3 days but less than 10 days is presumptively too short to fall within the Clause. The Court determined that they do, because the Senate retained "the capacity to transaction Senate business. Expedited procedures, also known as "fast track" procedures, or, more formally, "privileged procedures," are procedural rules established in statute to govern the action of either or both chambers on measures of a kind also specified by the statute.
Although these procedures are enacted into law, rather than being adopted as part of the standing rules of either chamber, they have the same force and effect as standing rules, but only with respect to the specified measures. Many expedited procedure statutes make the procedures they establish available only during specified periods, often beginning with the initial proposal by the executive, or similarly limit specific stages in the process.
The prescribed periods may be measured through any of several different ways of counting days, each of which is affected in a different way by the annual, and even the daily, recesses and adjournments of Congress. The ways of measuring time most often used in expedited procedures are calendar days , days of session , and days of continuous session.
A count of calendar days is the most straightforward, for in this case every day including weekends and holidays counts toward completion of the period, whether or not either chamber holds a daily session on that day, or even whether or not an annual session is ongoing.
Statutes generally define periods by days of session only for the Senate. The House, in general, does not make use of days of session as a technical term, and accordingly, the corresponding period for that chamber is usually defined by legislative days.
Periods defined in this way are, in any case, normally measured separately for each chamber, and in each case, only those days count on which a daily session of the chamber occurs. Days falling on a weekend, as a result, are usually not days of session for the Senate or legislative days for the House, and days falling while either chamber is in a recess of the session or a sine die adjournment are excluded from the count for that chamber as well.
Provisions of the Congressional Review Act, 80 for example, extend the opportunity for Congress to disapprove a proposed regulation through privileged procedures into a new session of Congress if Congress adjourns its previous session sine die before the 60 th session day in the Senate, or the 60 th legislative day in the House, after the regulation is submitted to Congress.
Periods measured in days of continuous session are usually defined by taking account simultaneously of the schedules of both chambers, counting each day unless either chamber is in a "recess of the session" or a sine die adjournment. By this standard, although days when either chamber is in a "recess of the session" will not count as days of continuous session, weekend days will count, even when neither chamber meets on those days unless they are part of a "recess of the session".
Calendar days are not affected by whether either chamber holds pro forma sessions instead of taking a recess or instead of adjourning sine die. The occurrence of pro forma sessions, on the other hand, does affect the count of days of session or legislative days, and also that of days of continuous session.
For example, suppose that one chamber takes a "recess of the session" from Friday until the second following Monday, while the other chamber continues to hold its daily sessions.
The nine days of the recess do not count as days of session or legislative days for the chamber that recessed its session, and they do not count as days of continuous session for either chamber. If, however, instead of taking this nine-day recess of the session, that same chamber meets for pro forma sessions on the intervening Tuesday and Friday, those two days will count as days of session or legislative days for that chamber.
If, however, this period is to be measured in days of continuous session , the existence of these two pro forma sessions of the one chamber while the other continues to hold its daily sessions means that no "recess of the session" now occurs in either chamber.
As a result, all nine days count, for both chambers, toward the completion of a period measured in days of continuous session. In this way, pro forma sessions tend to make days of continuous session elapse as fast as calendar days. For either chamber, the use of a period counted in legislative days could enable it to extend the calendar length of the period by recessing its daily sessions rather than adjourning them, or to shorten it by adjourning and reconvening more than once on each calendar day of session.
Occasionally, a statute has attempted to avoid this possibility by defining "legislative day," for its purposes, not in the technical sense explained earlier, but instead to mean what this report calls a "day of session. Calendar Days. Every calendar day including weekends and holidays counts toward completion of the period, whether or not either chamber holds a daily session on that day, or even whether or not an annual session is ongoing.
D ays of Continuous Session. Every calendar day of an annual session counts unless either chamber is in a "recess of the session" of three days or more or a sine die adjournment. By this standard, weekend days and holidays will count, even when neither chamber meets on those days, unless they are part of a "recess of the session.
Days of Session. Each chamber keeps a separate count of days, which includes only those days on which a daily session of the respective chamber occurs. Days falling on a weekend or holiday, as a result, are usually not days of session, and days falling while the chamber is in a recess of the session or a sine die adjournment are excluded as well. For some purposes, an expedited procedure may operate more smoothly if its periods for action run concurrently, or at least approximately so, in both chambers.
Whether they do so can depend not only on the standard by which the days of the periods are counted, but also by whether the periods begin at the same point for both chambers. For this purpose, for example, if a period is to begin when Congress receives a proposal from the executive, an expedited procedure may direct that the receipt must occur on a day when both chambers hold a daily session, or that it be deemed to occur on the next following day on which both chambers do so.
If a period measured in calendar days begins on the same day for both chambers, it will necessarily also end on the same day for both. The same is true for periods measured in days of continuous session, as usually defined, because the same days those on which either chamber is in recess are excluded from the count for both chambers. Using either of these methods of counting, however, a period may end on a day when both chambers are out of session.
Moreover, much of the period could go by while one chamber is or, under certain conditions, both are in a recess of the session or, in some cases, even in a sine die adjournment. These circumstances could limit the effective opportunity for a chamber to act under the expedited procedure.
A period measured in days of session, by contrast, cannot elapse except on days when the respective chamber is in session, and so cannot end except on such a day.
The two chambers, however, seldom follow exactly the same schedule of daily sessions. As a result, if periods for action pursuant to an expedited procedure are measured in session days, then even if they begin on the same calendar day in both chambers, they are likely to end on different calendar days in each.
In the second session of the th Congress, for example, if an action period of 60 days of session began on the day the annual session convened, it would have started in both chambers on January 3, , but the 60 th day of session would have occurred in the House on April 21, and in the Senate not until May As just noted, if a period during which an expedited procedure is available is measured in calendar days, it may expire during a sine die adjournment, in which case the effective opportunity for Congress to make use of the procedure becomes truncated.
In addition, some expedited procedure statutes explicitly provide that if the final adjournment sine die of a Congress occurs before the end of the period during which the expedited procedure is available, the period terminates with the sine die adjournment.
Also, as already noted, on the other hand, a period measured in days of session cannot expire during a sine die adjournment. In this case, any portion of the period remaining at the sine die adjournment could remain available for action under the expedited procedure in the following annual session. If the following session is the first of a new Congress, however, the remaining portion of the period may be too short to afford the incoming Congress a realistic opportunity to complete action, especially because the full lawmaking process under the expedited procedure would have to be accomplished de novo , beginning with the introduction of a new measure.
Some statutes are framed in such a way that if a measure specified in the statute is reintroduced in the Congress following the one in which the President submitted the corresponding proposal to be disapproved or approved, it is not eligible for expedited consideration. Some other expedited procedures deal with these possibilities by providing that if the final sine die adjournment of one Congress occurs before a prescribed period for action expires, a full new period for action becomes available from the start of the succeeding Congress.
Some provide also that at that point, the proposal by the executive is deemed resubmitted. Some of these statutes extend these arrangements also to the beginning of a second or subsequent session of the same Congress, even though, in such cases, any measure subject to the expedited procedure that was previously introduced and remains without final action would still be available for action in the new session. Similarly, when action periods measured in days of continuous session are broken by a sine die adjournment, a new Congress might commence with only a brief remainder of that action period remaining.
To forestall this situation, many statutes that count action periods in this way stipulate that the expedited procedure is available during the "first period of [the stipulated number of] days of continuous session of Congress beginning after" 84 the designated initiating event, and also provide that "continuity of session of Congress is broken … by an adjournment sine die" or, sometimes, only by a final adjournment sine die of the Congress. It appears, nevertheless, that Congress has sometimes interpreted such provisions as applying only when the executive branch resubmits the underlying proposal.
The President "pocket vetoes" a measure by leaving it unsigned when Congress has adjourned and so cannot override his disapproval. See " Presidential Action on Legislation " in this report for a discussion of this issue. A recess appointment is a temporary appointment by the President to fill a vacancy when the Senate is out of session. See " Recess Appointments " in this report for a discussion of this issue. Johnson, and John V. Riddick, Parliamentarian Emeritus, and Alan S.
Frumin, Parliamentarian, rev. Frumin, st Cong. In some contexts, the period between the adjournment of one annual session and the convening of the next also may be referred to as a "recess," as discussed under " Adjournment Sine Die ," "Recess of the Session ," and " Recess Appointments.
This account draws in part on observations offered by [author name scrubbed], specialist on Congress and the Legislative Process in the Government and Finance Division of the Congressional Research Service.
In both the House and Senate, this motion is not subject to debate, amendment, or a motion to lay on the table. With only narrow exceptions, the motion is in order at any point in the proceedings.
House Practice , pp. It is normally offered by a member or designee of the leadership of the majority party, which is accorded the responsibility for arranging the schedule of the chamber, and is usually adopted by voice vote. This statement requires modification for the House of Representatives, as discussed in the following section on " Recess of the Daily Session.
House Practice , chap. The member bringing up the motion has to have the backing of at least 50 fellow members. This one is simpler. Adjournment, it would be clear now, implies a putting off of a matter or business. Adjournment sine die thus means putting off indefinitely.
Such an announcement is normally made when the business of the Parliament for a particular session is deemed to have been completed. But such adjournment can also be done under extraordinary circumstances, as when cessation of the Budget Session of was called nearly 10 days ahead of its schedule due to the coronavirus pandemic.
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