The 72-Hour Rule

Proposed Legislation

The biggest bills Congress passes, the ones that spend trillions and quietly rewrite dozens of laws, are often voted on before anyone has had time to read them. Leadership negotiates behind closed doors for weeks, releases a few thousand pages at the last minute, and then uses the looming deadline as the reason there's no time to look.

You get days to review a mortgage or a lease. The people writing laws for 340 million Americans should have to give those Americans, and themselves, time to read the bill. This isn't a partisan complaint. Both parties do it, and both complain about it when they're in the minority.

How the Midnight Dump Works

December 2020: a 5,593-page COVID relief and government funding package was released around 2 p.m. and passed both chambers that same night.
December 2022: a 4,155-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus was posted at 1:40 a.m. on a Tuesday and cleared Congress by Friday.
March 2024: a 1,012-page, $1.2 trillion package was unveiled in the early hours of a Thursday and passed the House on Friday. The Speaker set aside his own conference's 72-hour pledge to beat a shutdown deadline.
The rule bends exactly when it matters. The House does have a 72-hour availability rule on paper, but a simple majority can waive it with a procedural "special rule," and bills can skip it entirely under suspension of the rules. The Senate has no comparable standing rule at all.

Credit Where It's Due

We didn't invent this idea, and we want to say so. For more than a decade, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has introduced the Read the Bills Act, which grew out of a 2006 proposal by the citizens' group DownsizeDC, to guarantee time to read every bill before a vote. The House adopted its own 72-hour rule in 2019. Our version builds on both, with changes meant to make it binding, workable on the floor, and passable with support from both parties.

What the Bill Does

72 real hours, both chambers. No final vote in the House or the Senate on a bill, joint resolution, or conference report until its text has been public online for 72 consecutive hours. Weekends count.
Leadership changes restart the clock. Manager's amendments, substitutes, and "self-executing" changes slipped in through a procedural rule are where the real abuse happens. Any substantive change of that kind restarts the 72 hours.
Ordinary floor amendments stay workable. Members offering amendments in open debate is healthy deliberation, not a loophole. Those amendments just have to be posted publicly before they're offered, with a list of everything adopted made public before the final vote. They don't restart the clock.
Readable, not just posted. Every bill comes with a searchable version, a redline showing exactly how it changes current law, a plain-language summary, and the Congressional Budget Office cost estimate when available.
Hard to waive. Setting the rule aside takes a separate two-thirds recorded vote on the waiver itself, and even then the text must be public for at least 48 hours. Only a declaration of war or a response to an armed attack is exempt. (Why 48 and not 24? The March 2024 package passed about a day and a half after release with more than two-thirds support. A 24-hour floor wouldn't have touched it.)
In the rulebook, too. The bill asks the House to write these requirements into the rules it adopts every January, and the Senate to adopt them as a standing order.

The Honest Trade-offs

We'll be straight about the hard parts, because we always try to be.

Each chamber writes its own rules. The Constitution lets the House and Senate set their own procedures, so a future majority can change this, most easily in the House rules package adopted every January. That's why the bill also asks for it to be written into those rules, and why a waiver has to be a separate, recorded, two-thirds vote: breaking the rule becomes a public act. The permanent version is our Single-Subject Rule amendment.
Nobody can force a Member to read. Seventy-two hours won't make every Member read every page. But it does let staff, reporters, watchdog groups, and ordinary citizens read it, and flag the pork, riders, and mistakes before the vote instead of after.
Real emergencies happen. That's what the two-thirds waiver, the 48-hour floor, and the war-or-attack exception are for. The goal is to end manufactured urgency, not slow down a real emergency.
Deadline deals get harder. Leaders who negotiate down to the wire will have to finish three days earlier. That's the point. It pairs with our No More Shutdowns amendment, which removes the shutdown cliff that drives so many midnight deals in the first place.
It could be gamed. Leaders could try posting placeholder text early, or pushing big changes through as "floor amendments." That's why the clock runs on the text actually being voted on, and why manager's amendments, substitutes, and self-executing changes restart it no matter how they're labeled.

This is a discussion draft prepared for review by legislative counsel and for presentation to Members of Congress—proposed statutory language, not final legislative text. The authors are not attorneys.

Download the Documents

Read the full bill, share it, and—most importantly—send it to your Representative. All three are formatted Word documents you can print or attach to an email.

One-Page Summary
The quick version—the whole idea at a glance. Great for sharing. Plain-Language Explainer & Advocacy Guide
How the midnight dump works, what the bill does, the honest trade-offs, and how to help. Full Proposed Bill Text
The complete section-by-section statutory language.

Step 1: Find Your Representative

This is a bill, so it can pass Congress and be signed into law—no state ratification required. The people to contact are your U.S. Representative and your two U.S. Senators. Not sure who they are?

Find Your U.S. Representative → Find Your U.S. Senators →

A short, specific message from a constituent carries real weight—far more than a mass-produced form letter. Personal calls to a district office count even more.

Step 2: Send a Message

Here's a letter you can use as a starting point. Make it your own—add a sentence about why this matters to you. Fill in the bracketed pieces, then paste it into your Representative's contact form or print and mail it.

Dear [Representative / Senator] [Last Name],

As your constituent in [City/Town, State], I am writing to ask you to support—and help pass—a binding, statutory 72-hour rule for both chambers of Congress.

Too often, the largest bills Congress passes are voted on within hours or a day or two of their text being released: a 5,593-page package in December 2020, a 4,155-page omnibus in December 2022, and a 1,012-page package in March 2024. The House's existing 72-hour rule can be waived by a simple majority, and the Senate has no comparable rule.

The bill I support builds on Senator Rand Paul's Read the Bills Act. It would require the text of every bill, joint resolution, and conference report to be public for 72 consecutive hours before a final vote in either chamber, with a redline showing how it changes current law and a plain-language summary. Leadership's last-minute changes would restart the clock, while ordinary floor amendments would simply have to be posted before they are offered. Waiving the rule would take a separate two-thirds recorded vote, with the text still public for at least 48 hours. It applies equally to every party.

I would also ask you to support adding these requirements to the rules the House adopts at the start of each Congress.

Full text and a plain-language explainer are available at commonsenseforamerica.org/72-hour-rule. I would welcome knowing where you stand, and I hope you will introduce or co-sponsor such a bill.

Thank you for your time and your service.

Sincerely,
[Your Name]
[Your Street Address]
[City, State ZIP]
[Email / Phone]

Consider attaching the one-page summary or the full bill text (above) so your Representative's office has the actual language in hand.

★ Why This Should Be Easy to Rally Behind

"Read the bill before you vote on it" is about as close to universal common sense as politics gets. Members of both parties demand it whenever they're in the minority, then waive it when they're in charge. This makes it binding no matter who holds the gavel.

The 72-Hour Rule is the statutory cousin of our Single-Subject Rule amendment, and it pairs with No Budget, No Pay so "on time" never means "unread." Both are part of the broader Fix Washington agenda: a Congress that does its job, on time, in the open.