SENATE RESOLUTION: J.K. Sestak Congressional Reform Resolution (Passed)

[Attorney General & PPT Dwarven Dragon]

Thinking aloud here, maybe the way to make this work is a semi-permanent joint session. As in, four members of the House or Three members of the Senate could ay any time demand an up to five day separation which would then be granted. This could allow the bodies to debate a given topic or amendment on their own threads. Amendment votes could take place while separated, but other votes could not. We could even have more fast track amendment rules for the separated period so you could do a series of votes with each lasting 12 or 18 hours to clear out bills with a large number of amendments without discouraging offering a large number of amendments.

The joint session would automatically reconvene at the end of the 5 days, or earlier if ordered by a majority of both the House and Senate. It would immediately proceed with any amendment that had only been voted on by one side during the separation before resuming other business/conducting other votes.

Basically, an Atlasian version of the committee of the whole in real life. Keep all the benefits of the joint session - increased debate, one joint vote period for procedural and final passage votes, one bill queue - while keeping the option - never an obligation - to temporarily separate to decide a series of amendments, decide how to rescue a flailing but important bill, or even just debate a topic in separate threads. Heck, the existence of this procedure would serve to encourage more debate, as members would not feel pressure to limit bills to 2 or 3 total omnibus amendments to avoid holding things up, but could instead vote on various versions of smaller changes in similar amounts of time. And with each body using separate threads during that time, there wouldn't be any confusion.

Want to keep the joint session from almost never being joint? Simply implement a per session limit on separation- say 5 times a session, perhaps overrideable by a 75% majority of both bodies. This would ensure that non controversial and/or straightforward bills would still have all proceedings done jointly.