What is a compromise bill?
The most common example is when two bills of similar goal are started in the House and the Senate and each is amended, although it can also happen that a bill started in one house is amended in the other. When both houses of Congress have passed their versions of the bill, a committee is formed, usually of the sponsors and other members who ask to be on it, and they meet and try to hammer out a single bill that contains the features both sides are willing to live with and deletes the things that will prevent the bill from passing – it is a collection of compromises – enough people get something that they want that they give up getting everything. The bill is then sent to both houses which must pass it in the same form before sending on to the President. In fact, almost every bill is likely to be a compromise bill – someone writes up a bill and “puts it in the hopper” and it is assigned to a committee or sub-committee and it is modified until it is more likely to be passed or it is amen
I’m not sure if there’s a specific legal meaning in the US or anything, but generally speaking, most bills start off as quite very extreme proposals. The people who introduce the bill take a bit of flak for various issues with it, and then usually rewrite the bill to address some of those issues, or to compromise with people who think the bill should be different in some more fundamental way. So, if the plan was to spend money on new petrol cars, and the environmentalists complained, a compromise bill might say that the money would be spent on some petrol cars, and some electric cars, or on hybrid cars, or something like that. Perhaps cynically, it has been argued that compromise bills that start off more strongly and then get watered down are DELIBERATELY started too strongly, so that people will accept them when they’re watered down, even if the watered down version is still against the people’s interests.
