Draft Legislation
5 nodes · kind (ufo)
A set of provisions that is not law: a bill before the General Assembly, an alternative version of an act that did pass, or a change nobody has introduced at all. It is a Kind on the same reading model-policy is — a draft’s identity is fixed at the version it was read or authored at, and an amendment produces a new version rather than changing what the old one said.
It is deliberately not the legislation class, and the argument is the
one that class already makes about itself. legislation is a Kind whose identity is fixed
at enactment: it carries a signing date, an effective date, a numbered General Assembly and
a line-item veto list. A draft has none of those and may never have any of them. Holding both
in one class would let a reader take a proposal for a statute, which is the specific error
this class exists to prevent — the same error, one document earlier in the process, that
model-policy was separated from legislation to stop.
One class covers three kinds of draft, because the difference is provenance and not
identity. A bill introduced in the 136th, a counterfactual rewrite of H.B. 96, and an
invented change are the same sort of object — provisions that would alter the funding system
and have not — and they enter the graph at the same places. provenance says which, and it
is the field that decides how every other one is read: designation and general_assembly
are facts for an introduced bill and empty for an invented one, while question is the
reason an invented one exists at all.
What a node of this class may and may not claim. It may state what its provisions would
do, because a provision is a stated change to a named parameter. It may state what the
calculators compute for the provisions they can run, because those runs are committed and
reproducible. It may not state a cost for the draft as a whole unless every provision
priced — see unpriced, which is mandatory rather than omitted when the answer is nothing,
because a class that could report a partial figure but had nowhere to record what it left out
would publish two thirds of a bill as its cost.
A draft that passes does not become a legislation node. A new node is written in that
class and this one gains an enacted-as edge to it. The draft is not edited, on the rule
legislation/ACTIONS.md already states for amendment: the earlier node stands as it was.
Nodes
| Counterfactual: H.B. 96 with FY2024 Cost Inputs | Am. Sub. H.B. 96 as it might have been written: the phase-in completed exactly as enacted, and the base cost reference year refreshed to FY2024 rather than held at FY2022. One provision, one lever, and no bill anyone introduced. |
|---|---|
| Fund the Plan and Retire the Guarantee | A hypothetical six-provision bill that refreshes the cost inputs and retires half the temporary transitional aid guarantee with its backstopping supplement. It lowers the transportation floor and does two further things no lever reaches. Nobody proposed it. It exists to be the case a single-provision draft cannot be. |
| H.B. 643 (136th G.A., as introduced) | A pending bill capping EdChoice expansion eligibility at $500,000 of federal adjusted gross income. One section, two sponsors, no committee report — and no provision any calculator here can price, because the scholarship channel is not modeled at all. |
| H.B. 96 (136th G.A., as introduced) | The executive budget as introduced — the stage the FY2026-27 act began at. It sets the phase-in to 83.33% and 100%, which is exactly what was enacted, and freezes base cost at FY2022 by extending the section's years without touching its data year. |
| H.B. 96 (136th G.A., as passed by the House) | The stage the enacted act was chosen over. It carries the same phase-in percentages as the executive proposal and the act — and a section forbidding the department to pay under the formula those percentages govern, substituting FY2025 aid plus half the distance. |
Properties
What a draft legislation may carry.
| Property | Type | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Provenance | string | Which kind of draft this is, and therefore how the rest of the fields read: introduced — a real bill before the General Assembly, whose text exists and moves as it is amended; counterfactual — an alternative version of an enactment that did pass, where the act is real and the variant is not; hypothetical — a change nobody has introduced, authored to test a question. |
| Designation | string | Bill designation where the draft has one. Empty for a hypothetical draft, and for a counterfactual it names the act being rewritten rather than claiming a number of its own. |
| General Assembly | string | Numbered General Assembly the bill is before, where it is before one |
| Sponsors | text | Who introduced it, and any joint sponsors. "None." where the draft was never introduced — which is an answer rather than an empty field, because a bill nobody introduced has no sponsors and never will. |
| Status | text | Where the draft stands — introduced, reported out of committee, passed one chamber, died with the session, or never introduced. The field that stops a reader taking a proposal for a statute on a page that otherwise looks like one. |
| Text read | text | Which version of the text this node was written from, and the digest pinning the bytes. Load-bearing here in a way it is not for an enacted act: a pending bill's text moves under its own URL as it is amended, so "the bill says" without a version names a moving target. |
| Question | text | What the draft is constructed to test. For a hypothetical or counterfactual draft this is the reason it exists; for an introduced bill it is what reading it is expected to settle. |
| Provisions | text | Each provision: what it does, the Revised Code section it would amend or uncodified, the parameter it binds, the baseline value and the proposed one, and whether the calculators can run it. The unit of this class — a bill is a list of these and a scenario is a subset of them, so this is where the prose meets the simulation. |
| Not priced | text | The provisions the calculators cannot run, and what each would need before they could. Mandatory on every node in the class, including the ones where the answer is none. A cost cannot be stated without the count of provisions it fails to price, on exactly the ground scenario-delta refuses a total without the count of districts it fails to reach. |
Relationships
The edges this class may enter into. Out is declared by the node itself; in is declared by the node at the other end.
| Relationship | To | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Alters out | Formula Parameter | A parameter one of this draft's provisions would change. The same verb scenario uses, deliberately: a provision and a perturbation are the same act described in two vocabularies, and giving them different verbs would hide that the draft is what the run is of. |
| Priced by out | Worked Scenario | A run that prices some or all of this draft's provisions. Plural in practice — a bill needs one run per provision to attribute and one combined run for its total, because the levers interact and the per-provision figures do not sum to it. |
| Amends out | Legislation | An enactment this draft would change |
| Redrafts out | Legislation | The act a counterfactual draft is an alternative version of. Distinct from amends: an amending bill changes a statute that stands, while a redraft asks what the same act would have done had it chosen otherwise, and only one of those is a thing anyone could introduce. |
| Measured against out | Funding Regime | The regime the draft's provisions are a change against |
| Enacted as out | Legislation | The act this draft became, where it passed. Added to the draft rather than replacing it, so that what was introduced and what was enacted stay separately readable. |
| Creates out | Funding Program | A program the draft would establish |
| Constrains out | Revenue Stream | A revenue channel the draft would limit, freeze, or redirect |
| Parallels out | Model Policy | A published template the draft's provisions resemble. The verb is borrowed from model-policy with its caution attached: a resemblance between two texts is all that is established, and adoption needs drafting history no source here carries. |