Conference Committees

A conference committee is a temporary panel of House and Senate members convened to reconcile differences between the two chambers' versions of a bill. Its compromise text must then be approved by both chambers without further amendment.

Bills must pass the House and Senate in identical form before going to the President. The two chambers, with different rules, different constituencies, and different leadership, rarely produce identical bills on major legislation. The conference committee is the traditional mechanism for resolving the differences. After both chambers have passed their versions, leaders from each appoint a small group of members, called conferees or managers, to negotiate a compromise. The conferees include members of the committees of jurisdiction in both chambers. They meet, sometimes openly and sometimes behind closed doors, to draft a single text that can pass both chambers. The result, called a conference report, is then sent back to the House and Senate. Each chamber must approve the report by a majority vote, but no further amendments are permitted. The report goes up or down as a whole. Conference committees were once the standard final step on major legislation. In recent decades, congressional leaders have increasingly used informal "amendments between the chambers" or other procedures to bypass formal conferences, partly because they are easier for leadership to control. The decline of the formal conference process is one of several factors observers cite when describing the weakening of regular order in Congress. The basic function remains, whether performed by a formal conference or by other means. Two chambers, designed by the framers to deliberate differently, must somehow agree on the same words.