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:
“When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity.... We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.”
—Lewis Thomas (b. 1913)
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)