Robert's Rules for Presiding over a Debate

If you're a presiding officer, your leadership skills and knowledge of Robert's Rules are clearly on display when you're chairing a meeting during the consideration of a motion that sparks a lot of debate.

When it comes to presiding, your number-one duty is to know the rules. The rules for discussion and debate get quite a workout in meetings, so if you know the rules, you'll do just fine. And if you don't know them, sooner or later you'll wish you did.

Starting the debate

A debate is in order only when a motion is on the floor. After the motion is on the floor, it's up to the members and you as the presiding officer to work as a team to figure out what, if anything, the assembly wants to do with the motion.

Your job while presiding is to keep up with who has spoken and who wants to speak. You control the assignment of the floor and handle discussion and secondary motions until no further discussion is forthcoming, or until members close debate or otherwise dispose of the motion.

Assigning the floor

Knowing that members control decisions but the chair controls the floor is at the heart of successful presiding. Early in a discussion, the situation is pretty clear. Members rise and address the chair, and you basically want to take them in the order they seek recognition — first come, first served. But when things become a little more complicated, you need to know who gets preference to have the floor.

Refraining from debate

Your job is to facilitate the members making all the points on an issue. If you feel strongly about an issue, hope your political allies can handle advancing your goals from the floor. You must not give them any edge or advantage. The appearance of impartiality is the key to presiding over debate. Nobody expects you to be impartial; chances are good that you were elected because you have a program you hope to advance. But when you're presiding, stick to the job at hand.

If you absolutely must engage in the debate, you're obligated to turn the chair over to a chairman pro tem and step down from the chair until the motion is disposed of.

Closing debate and taking the vote

Because of the right of members to enjoy all the time the group is willing to spend in debate, it's not in order to move so quickly to the voting as to silence a member who legitimately seeks the floor to speak or make a secondary motion. Robert's Rules calls this practice of silencing members gaveling through, and it's looked upon as particularly contemptible. If you ignore a member who seeks recognition before voting starts and proceed to take a vote, then the vote must be disregarded and debate reopened, even if the result has been announced. However, when you've made sure the members have a full opportunity to claim the floor before you move on to the voting, it's too late to reopen debate after voting has begun.

The debate remains closed even if the vote is not conclusive and if additional votes are necessary to determine the result.

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