The right to make motions to recommit in the contemporary House of Representatives is the prerogative of the minority party. The motion is in order in the House, but not in the Committee of the Whole (formally, Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union). A motion to recommit must be offered after the previous question is ordered on a measure, but before the vote on final passage takes place. When a measure is called up under a "special rule" that orders the previous question in advance through final passage, the rule expressly protects the right to move to recommit. In practice, a recommittal motion typically is offered after engrossment and third reading of the measure. Only one valid motion can be offered, and it can take one of two forms: a simple (or "straight") motion, or a motion with instructions . Both forms have equal privilege on the House floor, but differ in how they affect the underlying measure. This report discusses the two forms of recommittal motion, relevant rules of the House, the minority's prerogative to offer the motion, and procedures for disposing of motions to recommit. The report emphasizes motions to recommit bills and conference reports because they represent the overwhelming majority of all recommittal motions each Congress. Data on motions to recommit made from the 101 st Congress through the 109 th Congress are presented in tables throughout the report. Motions that were offered and then ruled out of order are not counted in these data. The appendix provides information about the recommittal motions that the House adopted between 1989 and 2006. In general, motions to recommit can be offered during initial House floor consideration of bills and most resolutions, and sometimes conference reports as well. The motion is out of order, however, when measures are called up under the "suspension of the rules" procedure. Table 1 below shows data on the different types of measures that to which motions to recommit were offered from the 101 st Congress through the 109 th Congress. The largest number of recommittal motions were offered to bills and conference reports, respectively. While the remainder of this report concentrates on motions to recommit bills and conference reports , there are some restrictions on moving to recommit other types of measures: Simple resolutions: It is not in order to move to recommit a resolution on the order of business (usually called a "rule" or "special rule") reported by the House Rules Committee. Concurrent resolutions: Section 305(a) of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, as amended, forbids motions to recommit from being offered to concurrent budget resolutions or conference reports on them. Joint resolutions: The House sometimes acts on joint resolutions to disapprove or approve of specific executive actions under the terms of special expedited or "fast-track" procedures that may prohibit the offering of recommittal motions to those resolutions. Both forms of the motion to recommit —simple and with instructions—propose to send a bill (or other measure) back to a House committee, typically the committee that originally reported the measure (the "reporting committee"). A simple motion to recommit a bill gives the minority a final opportunity to reject that measure. The motion proposes only to return the bill to the committee that had reported it. When the House adopts a simple recommittal motion, the underlying bill goes back to committee and is considered to have been rejected by the House. The simple motion gives the House an indirect way to "kill" a bill instead of voting directly on its final passage. By contrast, a motion to recommit with instructions provides the minority a last chance to amend a bill. A recommittal motion in this form proposes to send the bill back to committee and also to instruct the committee as to what additional action on the bill it should take. Most often, these instructions direct the committee contain an additional amendment to the bill. Thus, the mover of a recommittal motion with instructions seeks not to "kill" the underlying bill, but to change it to conform more fully with his or her policy views. These policy views are generally those advocated by the minority party. Most recommittal motions with instructions order the committee to report the bill back to the House "forthwith" with an amendment. These "amendatory instructions" contain the text of the proposed amendment. In this form, a recommittal motion gives the committee no discretion and no time in which to act. The committee must return the bill to the House with the amendment immediately. Consequently, when the House adopts a recommittal motion with amendatory instructions , the underlying bill is not actually sent back to committee. Instead, the chairman of the committee specified in the motion takes the floor and, on behalf of the committee, immediately reports the measure back to the House with the amendment set forth in the instructions. At this point, the bill is before the House once again, and the amendment contained in the instructions is the pending question for the House to decide. So the House proceeds to vote on the amendment. If the amendment is adopted, the House then votes on whether to pass the bill as it now has been amended. (See the " Recommittal of a Bill: A Case Study " section for an illustration of these procedures in practice.) Table 2 below presents data on motions to recommit bills from the 101 st Congress through the 109 th Congress. The overwhelming majority (88%) of the motions offered contained instructions, as did all the motions that the House adopted . Motions to recommit bills with amendatory instructions cannot propose an amendment that would not have been in order if it had been offered directly as an amendment to the bill. For instance, amendatory instructions must be germane to the underlying measure. To cite one example from the 103 rd Congress, a motion to recommit H.R. 3221 (Iraq Claims Act) with amendatory instructions was ruled out of order because the amendment contained in the instructions was not germane to the underlying bill. The chair explained that the instructions proposed adding language that would change immigration law, a subject that was not addressed in the underlying bill. Amendatory instructions also cannot propose to strike out an amendment that the House already has adopted; this is consistent with the principle that an amendment cannot be amended after having been adopted. By the same token, the instructions cannot propose to amend a portion of the bill that the House already has amended in its entirety; this reflects the principle that it is not in order to propose to amend only amended text. The amendment in a recommittal motion can, however, propose (and often has proposed) an amendment that was earlier rejected by the Committee of the Whole or the House. When the House adopts an amendment in the nature of a substitute reported by the Committee of the Whole (i.e., a completely new version of the bill), this action could preclude a recommittal motion from including amendatory instructions because any amendment would propose to reamend some portion of the bill that the House already has amended. For this reason, whenever a special rule anticipates that the House will consider an amendment in the nature of a substitute, the special rule almost always provides explicitly for a motion to recommit "with or without instructions." If the House considers a bill under a special rule, amendatory instructions in the recommittal motion must conform with any other relevant provisions of that resolution. For example, if the special rule prohibits amendments to Title II of the bill in both the Committee of the Whole and the House, it would be out of order to move to recommit the bill with instructions to amend Title II. Amendatory instructions also must abide by certain rule-making provisions of law, such as certain provisions in the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 ( P.L. 93-344 , 88 Stat. 297-339, as amended). When the underlying measure is a general appropriations bill , a motion to recommit with amendatory instructions must comply with other applicable House rules. Most important, the instructions cannot violate House Rule XXI, clause 2 which prohibits amendments to general appropriations bills from containing legislative language or making unauthorized appropriations. While most instructions are amendatory, some recommittal motions contain non-amendatory instructions, such as directing a committee to hold a hearing or to conduct a study. If the House recommits a bill with non-amendatory instructions, the measure is returned to the designated committee for action as specified in the instructions. The committee's work is confined to the scope of the instructions. In the 104 th Congress, Representative Edward Markey moved to recommit H.R. 1555 (Communications Act of 1995) with amendatory instructions directing the Committee on Commerce to report the bill back to the House "forthwith" with an amendment. The House adopted this recommittal motion by a vote of 224-199. The amendatory instructions in Representative Markey's motion proposed adding a new section to H.R. 1555 . This new section required, among other things, that television sets manufactured in or imported to the United States be equipped with a program-blocking technology called the "v-chip" (formally, the "violence chip"). Earlier, Representative Markey had offered this identical section as an amendment in the Committee of the Whole. The Committee of the Whole, however, adopted a substitute for the Markey amendment. The substitute amendment, offered by Representative Tom Coburn proposed a policy alternative that did not include the "v-chip" requirement. The Committee of the Whole then adopted the Markey amendment as amended by the Coburn substitute. As a result, there was no direct vote during the amending process in Committee of the Whole on the "v-chip" mandate proposed in the original Markey amendment (i.e., the amendment as offered by Representative Markey, not the version as amended by the Coburn substitute). Representative Markey secured this "up-or-down" vote in the House by offering a motion to recommit H.R.