A first reading is when a bill is introduced to a legislature. Typically, in the United States, the title of the bill is read and immediately assigned to a committee. The bill is then considered by committee between the first and second readings. In the United States Senate and most British-influenced legislatures, the committee consideration occurs between second and third readings.
In Ireland, the first reading is referred to as "First Stage" and is leave to introduced a bill into a House of the Oireachtas. It may be taken in either house, but it does not need to be taken in both.
In New Zealand, once a bill passes first reading it is normally referred to a Select Committee. However, a Government can have a bill skip the select committee stage by a simple majority vote in Parliament.
A bill can be defeated on first reading if no one else other than the member introducing the bill seconds it.
Read more about this topic: Reading (legislature)
Famous quotes containing the word reading:
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)
“A reading machine, always wound up and going,
He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)