Glossary
- Amendment
- Proposal to change the text of a bill after it has been introduced. Amendments must be submitted to the Legislative Counsel for drafting or approval.
Author’s amendments - Amendments proposed by the bill’s author. Author’s amendments to a bill may be adopted on the floor prior to the committee hearing on the bill with the committee chair’s approval.
Hostile amendments - Amendments proposed by another member and opposed by the author in a committee hearing or during Assembly or Senate floor consideration.
- Appropriation
- The amount of money made available for expenditure by a specific entity for a specific purpose, from the General Fund or other designated state fund or account.
- Fiscal Bill
- Generally, a measure that contains an appropriation of funds or requires a state agency to incur additional expense. The Legislative Counsel’s designation of whether a bill is a fiscal bill appears at the end of the Digest found in the printed bill. Fiscal bills must be heard by the Assembly and Senate Appropriations Committees in addition to the policy committees in each house.
- Floor
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(1) The Assembly or Senate Chamber.
(2) The term used to describe the location of a bill or the type of session, connoting action to be taken by the house. Matters may be said to be “on the floor.”
- Held in Committee
- Status of a bill that fails to receive sufficient affirmative votes to pass out of committee.
- Inactive File
- The portion of the Daily File containing legislation that is ready for floor consideration, but, for a variety of reasons, is dead or dormant. An author may move a bill to the inactive file, and move it off the inactive file at a later date. During the final weeks of the legislative session, measures may be moved there by the leadership as a method of encouraging authors to take up their bills promptly.
- Non-fiscal Bill
- A measure not having specified financial impact on the state and, therefore, not required to be heard in an Assembly or Senate fiscal committee as it moves through the legislative process. Non-fiscal bills are subject to different legislative calendar deadlines than fiscal bills.
- Not Advancing
- Author has decided not to pursue the passage of the bill.
- Sponsor
- The Member of the Legislature, private individual, or group who develops a measure and advocates its passage.
- Spot Bill
- A bill that proposes non-substantive amendments to a code section in a particular subject; introduced to assure that a bill will be available, subsequent to the deadline to introduce bills, for revision by amendments that are germane to the subject of the bill.