The Bill Expires in January

At 9.42 on Monday night the Senate passed S. 4668, the Protect College Sports Act, by 77 votes to 22. The roll call, number 250 of the session, shows 50 Republicans, 26 Democrats and Angus King of Maine in favour. Against were 19 Democrats, among them the minority leader, Chuck Schumer, together with Bernie Sanders and two Republicans, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rick Scott of Florida. Dan Sullivan of Alaska did not vote.

It is the furthest any attempt to write federal rules for college sport has got. It is also, from this morning, on a clock that has nothing to do with college sport.

A bill lasts as long as the Congress that passed it

Under the Twentieth Amendment, the terms of senators and representatives end “at noon on the 3d day of January.” On 3 January 2027 the 119th Congress ends. Every bill that has passed one chamber but not the other ends with it. There is no carry-over. If the House has not passed S. 4668 in identical form by then, the Senate’s vote last night will count for nothing, and a new Congress starts from an empty docket.

The House is out. According to reporting by Yahoo Sports and CBS Sports, it is not scheduled to sit again until 9 November, six days after the midterm elections. From then until noon on 3 January is 55 calendar days, and they include Thanksgiving, Christmas and whatever else a lame-duck session has to finish, beginning with the government’s funding, which runs out on 11 December.

Three ways the bill can end

The first is the simplest. The House takes up the Senate’s text and passes it unchanged. It then goes to the President. The White House has formally recommended passage, according to the Senate Commerce Committee.

The second is the one the House’s own history points to. The House has its own bill, the SCORE Act. Yahoo Sports reports that Republican leaders pulled it from the floor in December 2025, hours before a scheduled vote and after a procedural motion survived 210 to 209, and pulled it again in May when the Congressional Black Caucus came out against it. If the House passes the Senate bill with its own changes, the bill goes back to the Senate. The Senate would then need to agree to those changes, and the Senate’s rules would allow another filibuster. The chamber that has just spent a week on this bill would have to find floor time and 60 votes for it again in December.

The third is that nothing happens, and the bill expires at noon on 3 January.

A clock inside the clock

Timing matters in one more way. Article I gives the President ten days, Sundays excepted, to sign or return a bill. If Congress adjourns for good within those ten days and the President has not signed it, the bill does not become law. A bill that reached the White House in the last days of December could be lost to the calendar even if both chambers had passed it. To be safe from it, the House has to act some days before the Congress ends, not on its last afternoon.

What changed on the floor

The Senate took six roll-call votes on Monday. It adopted one amendment, from Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, 96 to 1, described in the record as modifying “the provision relating to the relationship of this Act to existing law.” It rejected four others: Rand Paul’s amendment, titled simply “To improve the bill,” by 94 to 1; John Kennedy’s cap on ticket-price increases by 54 to 42; and two from Cory Booker, on insurance funding for former athletes and on standards for coaches, by 50 to 49 and 52 to 47.

The Booker amendment on insurance failed by a single vote. The text of the Baldwin amendment has not been read by this publication, and so what it changed about the relationship between the bill and existing law is not stated here. As this publication reported on Monday, the bill writes the pay cap from the House v. NCAA settlement into federal law and protects it from antitrust suits. The House now decides whether that happens. It has 55 days in which to do it.

Sources

The vote on passage, the party breakdown and the names are taken from the Senate’s roll-call record for vote 250 of the second session of the 119th Congress, and the amendment votes from the Senate’s vote list for 28 September, both read directly on Tuesday. The White House’s position is as stated by the Senate Commerce Committee. The House’s return date and the SCORE Act’s history are as reported by Yahoo Sports and CBS Sports. The 11 December funding date is that of the current continuing resolution, as reported by the National Association of Counties and Government Executive.