I’m Just A Bill
From Schoolhouse Rock (Season 3, Episode 5)
Categories:
Run time: 3:02
Clip Description: Featuring a song of the same title written by Dave Frishberg, this segment is part of “America Rock,” in the third season of the Schoolhouse Rock series. This song humorously details how a bill becomes a law, including the process Congress goes through, as well as the possible veto process.
American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: In this clip from Schoolhouse Rock titled “I’m Just a Bill,” a bill explains how, if it actually happens, he would get through Congress to become a law.
Possible Uses in Classroom: This is a humorous way to reinforce the teaching of a key Congressional power while also highlighting the need for cooperation and compromise between lawmakers and the President.
Discussion Questions
- The song’s whole drama is the veto — everything builds toward whether the president signs. In the real Congress the overwhelming majority of bills die in committee and never reach a floor, let alone a desk. Why does the popular picture of lawmaking put the chokepoint at the end, where the president is, rather than at the beginning, where a committee chair is? What does that misplacement do to who voters blame when nothing passes?
- The bill in the song would require school buses to stop at railroad crossings — the kind of traffic rule that in the American system is overwhelmingly state law. Take that as a real question rather than a gotcha: how should someone decide whether a given problem belongs to Congress or to a state legislature? State the test you would use, then find a case where your own test gives you an answer you dislike.
- Most Americans learned this song as children and never replaced it. Say what it led you to expect from Congress. Then say whether the gap between the song and the real process reads to you as a failure of Congress or as the ordinary friction a large legislature needs in order to work. Be specific about which parts of the real process you would actually cut.
Assignment
Pick any bill currently before Congress on congress.gov and track it properly: sponsor, cosponsors, committee referral, every action taken, and — the part that matters — where it is stuck right now. In two pages, narrate its real path against the song’s, and then answer the question the song cannot: if it dies, name the specific person or specific rule that killed it. Most bills die anonymously, and discovering that you cannot name a killer is itself the finding.
Clip hosted on Critical Commons.