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How to Write a Bill


 

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Once you've found an interesting and relevant topic on which to write your bill and have done the necessary research, the next step is actually getting your bill ready for discussion in committee. A PMC bill should have three parts:

  • Preamble: This section should provide your reasons for the necessity of your bill. Why is your topic something that should be addressed by the government? This section's clauses should always begin with a "Whereas..."
  • Body: This section should be separated into sections and subsections. Each proposed idea for the implementation of the bill should be a section. Subsections should be used to provide further detail and clarification (definitions, etc.) for their appropriate bill sections.
  • Enactment Clause: This is the final section of the bill (and can be labeled as a section as normal). EACH BILL MUST HAVE AN ENACTMENT CLAUSE!! The enactment clause tells your fellow congressmen when your bill will take effect if passed. It may specify a future date (September 30, 2005) or a certain number of days following the passage of the bill (60 days after passage). Enactment dates within 30 days of passage are used for EMERGENCY legislation only. Enactment dates more than 90 days after passage is used for most legislation and is the enactment period for normal legislation.
As an additional aid, we are providing two sample bills that incorporate all the necessary parts of a PMC bill:
For PMC 2006, we are providing a bill template that we highly recommend you use. This is the preferred format for all PMC bills, and you can type your bill directly into the template or just copy and paste into it. If you have problems downloading this file as a Word document, you can view it here as an Adobe PDF file, for which you will need to install Adobe Acrobat Reader (available here for download free). If you type up your own bills, make sure to include all the necessary bill sections listed above and format it to look like our bill template.