Legislative Agenda

[Jonathan Buhacoff]

Intent

To ensure that all elected representatives of the people in the legislature have an equal opportunity to speak on important topics and to introduce legislation.

Proposal

In every legislative session, representatives voluntarily sign up for speaking on a topic that they want and sign up to propose legislation (naming only the topic and the intent). The list is circulated to all representatives so they can see what others want to talk about and the legislation topics and intents. Representatives can then contact each other if they share goals and they may decide to collaborate and present together or to do it separately but near each other on the agenda. Representatives then submit requests such as wanting to speak together to combine their time or to merge or consolidate their legislative proposals. The administrative staff will honor requests that come from everyone involves, for example if two representatives want to speak together they both need to send a note to the administrative staff that they want to combine their time. Legislative proposals come with their own speaking time so the representatives introducing the legislation can speak about it then ask for a vote on the intent. When the administrative staff updates the agenda, they circulate it again and that becomes the agenda for the session.

The representatives set the agenda, not a single Speaker of the House or any committee.

Any legislative items that passed the intent vote are then scheduled for further votes on the content of the proposed law or on more refined intents with additional details but not the full law.

Discussion

In the United States, the Speaker of the House of Representatives decides when the legislature is in session and when it’s not. Famously in October of 2025, Speaker Mike Johnson kept the House of Representatives out of session for weeks claiming that they “did their job” already by passing some budget for the Senate to approve. However, making a budget is not the ONLY job of the legislature and there are other things that representatives want to talk about and vote on. But, with a system that allows one person to control whether the House of Representatives is in session, none of the representatives can do anything about it. Even to change the system they would need to convene and if the speaker doesn’t call a session then they don’t even convene to change the rules.

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