parliamentary procedure Parliamentary procedure is the accepted rules, ethics, and customs governing meetings of an assembly or organization. Its object is to allow orderly deliberation upon questions of interest to the organization and thus to arrive at the sense ...

, the

motion In physics, motion is the phenomenon in which an object changes its position with respect to time. Motion is mathematically described in terms of displacement, distance, velocity, acceleration, speed and frame of reference to an observer and m ...

to postpone indefinitely is a subsidiary motion used to kill a

main motion In parliamentary procedure, a motion is a formal proposal by a member of a deliberative assembly that the assembly take certain action. Such motions, and the form they take are specified by the deliberate assembly and/or a pre-agreed volume detaili ...

without taking a direct vote on it. This motion does not actually "postpone" it.

Explanation and use

In '' Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised'' (RONR), the effect of the motion, if adopted, is not to "postpone" the main motion, but rather to prevent action on it for the duration of the current session. It can be used when the assembly does not wish to adopt a motion, but explicitly rejecting it would perhaps be embarrassing, such as a motion to endorse a candidate for a political office. The motion to postpone indefinitely is the lowest-ranking of all motions other than the main motion, and therefore it cannot be made while any other subsidiary, privileged or incidental motion is pending. Because debate on the motion to postpone indefinitely may go into the merits of the pending main motion, it may provide members of the assembly with additional opportunities to debate the main motion beyond the number of speeches normally permitted by the rules. It can also be used by opponents of a main motion to test whether they have the votes needed to defeat the main motion, without risking a direct vote. If the motion to postpone indefinitely is defeated, direct consideration of the main motion is resumed, and opponents of the motion may then determine whether to continue in their effort to defeat the main motion.

Improper use of tabling a motion

Using the rules in RONR, a main motion is improperly killed by

tabling In computing, memoization or memoisation is an optimization technique used primarily to speed up computer programs by storing the results of expensive function calls and returning the cached result when the same inputs occur again. Memoizatio ...

it. In this case, it would have been proper to make a motion to postpone indefinitely. ''

The Standard Code of Parliamentary Procedure ''The Standard Code of Parliamentary Procedure'' (formerly the ''Sturgis Standard Code of Parliamentary Procedure'' by Alice Sturgis) is a book of rules of order. It is the second most popular parliamentary authority in the United States after ...

'' (TSC) does not have the motion to postpone indefinitely, and instead recommends use of this book's version of the motion to table (this version of "table" is different from that in RONR), which under these circumstances would require a two-thirds vote.

References

{{Parliamentary Procedure Subsidiary motions