Sinclair Unorthodox Law Making

Unorthodox Law Making is Barbra Sinclair’s attempt to describe the change in which how congress creates legislation. She does this by describing the different route a number of bill took on their journey though both chambers of congress and how each half of congress changes the rules to achieve their goals. To help explain this mainly with the Clean Air Act of 1970. She goes in to depth how the traditional ways of passing legislation took place. The school house rock video comes to mind while reading this.
“the 1970s bill was considered by a single committee in each chamber. It came to the House floor as a draft and approved by the committee, and it was considered there under an open rule allowing all germane amendment. The Senate also considered

The legislation was considered by several committees in the house, and in both chambers, compromises arrived at through informal processes altered the bills after the committees reported their legislation… In the Senate, the real possibility of a filibuster shaped the process, making it necessary of Majority leader Mitchell to build through negotiations an oversized coalition. (Sinclair 3).
This evolution in the legislative process could be a result of congress manipulating the rules to achieve goals in informal ways. The constitution doesn’t determine all of the rules in which congress is able to produce and pass legislation. So, congress will vote on the rules and guidelines in which they use to pass legislation.
Sinclair believes that one of the biggest reason for this change is the ever increasing divide among parties. According to Sinclair it’s not necessarily that parties work in completely different fashions but continuing on the path that was being set. “In fact, the Republican House did operate differently than its Democratic predecessor; however, as the data on special procedures and practices presented in this chapter suggests, Republican control resulted not in a change in direction but rather in an amplification of preexisting trends” (Sinclair 162). Sinclair goes on to say that the leaders of the parties have a role in how they determine rules that will run congress. In the example she gives, The Republicans took power for the committees to give the majority party a more centralized