| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
How Will Safe America Act Be Successful?To understand the answer to this question, we must first digress. How Does A Public Initiative Bill (PIB) Get From Grass Roots To Congress To Becoming Law?Public Initiative Bills (PIBs) are unique in that they derive their strength and ability to get enacted into law by virtue of public support and public pressure on leadership. In the normal bill making process, either a member of the lobbying community (private organizations or corporations, etc.) or a sponsoring member of Congress and his or her staff create the bill proposal. Once created, the bill proposal must usually gain additional sponsorship toward ensuring it can be taken to the floor for debate and possible vote. If the bill receives enough votes, it becomes law. With PIBs the public stands in as the bill creator rather than the private sector lobbyist or Congressional sponsor. In order for the public to create a PIB, it must first organize and may need to hire teams of researchers, analyst, lawyers, and others toward creation of their bill (a system by which well funded private lobbyist groups already utilize). The PUA generally provides this service free of charge to the public and its members. After the PIB is ready to go, the PUA provides the lobbying task and assist the public in getting the bill sponsored into Congress. Once sponsorship is found, the public then begins to pressure its leadership into supporting the bill and enacting it into law. In order to build up support for the bill, the traditional lobbyist use a combination of education, salesmanship, and political enticements, such as offering to contribute to future campaign funds. Generally speaking, the public lacks the funds to compete with opposition lobbyist but hold a much more power trump card that nearly always ensures support - the collective vote - for without the vote, the politician cannot remain in office. PIBs assure support and enactment into law by building a critical mass of public support and pressure that is applied to Congress and/or the White House until passage of the bill occurs. As the PIB process is lengthy, only a few PIBs can be deployed in any given year, which leaves the Congress to conduct the majority of its work as usual, un hindered by the PIB process. How Is A Public Initiative Bill Created and Enacted Into Law?
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Webmaster (-AT-) patriotunion.org for comments about this website or to link. Copyright 2005-2008 Patriot Union of America. All Rights Reserved. Permission to print or broadcast " fair-use" excerpts freely given, provided title, author, and PUA Web site are prominently mentioned or displayed. |