Talk:Bill (United States Congress)

Duplicate?

This page seems a little similar to Procedures of the United States Congress. I'm not convinced we should nominate for merge/deletion yet, but figured I'd start a discussion. It may be duplicate work to maintain both pages. Thoughts? –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:29, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

Agree that a merger is appropriate (with, I think, that page as the merge target). There may be lots of interesting things to say about any individual bill, but almost all the interesting things we could say about bills in general will actually be about the legislative procedures they go through. So the more complete the articles become, the more completely they will overlap each other. This article could include some information about vetoes (but doesn't), and Procedures of the United States Congress could also include things like nominations and investigative hearings (but doesn't), so it's not a perfect overlap. But I'd say that everything here could fit comfortably there (and a lot of it already is there). And even if the resulting article eventually outgrew itself and needed to be split, I don't think this is the split we would want. -- Visviva (talk) 03:52, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

On second thought, I wonder if the Procedures article is trying to just be about formal procedures, and what we really want is a distinct article about the whole life cycle of a bill. I've been eyeballing some even more redundant articles at the global level (legislation, lawmaking, bill (law), etc.), which seem like they probably all want to consolidated at Legislation, since that is an expressly "process AND unfinished product AND finished product" concept. Thinking about that, I wonder if it might be a better idea to merge the content here and the "how a bill becomes a law" material at Procedures into something like Legislation in the United States? -- Visviva (talk) 04:04, 24 June 2022 (UTC)