In recent years, a number of studies have examined
the incidence of “killer amendments”—that is,
amendments that once adopted cause a bill that previously had
majority support to fail—in Congress. Yet most of these
studies have been either case specific, focusing on the legislative
maneuverings around a single issue or bill, or temporally limited,
focusing on strategic activity in only one or two Congresses.
In this paper, the authors begin a comprehensive
research agenda for the systematic study of killer amendments
in Congress. Using a dataset that codes each House roll-call vote
from the 83rd through the 108th Congresses (1953-2004), they identify
those bills that were successfully amended and subsequently went
down to defeat, a necessary condition for the existence of a killer
amendment. They then examine these cases in greater detail, using
both macro-level spatial analyses and micro-level case studies.
Their results indicate that killer amendments are rare, although
they uncover five cases, four of which are new, that appear to
fit the characteristics of true killers.
Charles J. Finocchiaro, Department
of Political Science, University at Buffalo, SUNY Jeffery A. Jenkins,
Department of Political Science, Northwestern University
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