It would be wonderful if Congress was not allowed to amend any bills. It seems to me that a major problem with our political system is adding pork to bills to either kill them or sneak in some unrelated legislation.
[0] - Most of pork barrel spending is not on bridges to no where but on research for diseases, local roads, police officers, VA benefits, emergency response to hurricane Sandy etc...
Whether the ability to add amendments prolongs or delays the passing of laws, that's a tough one.
"The Act was passed on the last day before Congress adjourned for the 2006 elections. According to Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), no one on the Senate-House Conference Committee had seen the final language of the bill before it was passed.[4][5] The Economist has written that these provisions were "hastily tacked onto the end of unrelated legislation"."
Edit to add: I agree that the ability to amend bills shouldn't be removed entirely, but it certainly needs an overhaul.
Sounds good to me! If I ever run for office (ha!), I'd run on a platform of reducing the number of outstanding laws -- e.g. every new law passed requires two antiquated laws to be rescinded. Plus, as a side benefit, we could massively reduce the amount of quid pro quo pork added via amendments. Consider it the legal version of "My net programming contribution this week was -2000 lines of code." [1]
[1] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...
I often hear people say things like, "If Republicans and Democrats (or the house and senate) could work together, they'd get a lot more done.", and I think to myself, "Is a 'productive' congress one that passes thousands of pages of legislation?".
The point was: Continuously bolting on new {law, code} tends to monotonically increase a system's complexity. Many people consider unnecessary complexity "bad." I'm one of those people.
Meanwhile, amendments now serve the purpose of attaching valence issues (i.e. hyped up issues that turn voters into idiots) onto any significant piece of legislation. See Congress now -- having trouble deciding whether Planned Parenthood funding is worth shutting down the entire federal government.
But the solutin isn't getting rid of amendatory processes, because those processes aren't the root of any contemporary problem. Amendmory processes have been around since long before the US was even a country.
If your proposal became law, Congress would still do these compromises, they would just pass the provisions on a different bill -- say, "vote for my bill and I'll later vote for your pork project in the next appropriation". All that would change is the difficulty of coordinating it. The fundamental problem is still there.
No amount of process-tweaking is going to make any difference if Americans keep electing stupid assholes to public office. Likewise, even a rather broken set of processes can be mitigated if they're administered by intelligent and reasonable people.
(Now, for my pet idea :)
What I would like to see, in addition to an electorate that doesn't make such terrible decisions, is a requirement that every bill have a falsifiable statement of purpose, along with clear and convincing reasoning why the proposed legislation might achieve that purpose. The purpose would always include some time limit. If the purpose of the bill is not achieved by the time the limit is up, then the bill is automatically repealed. If the courts (or some new institution analogous to the courts) determines the the reasoning is not clear, or the time limit is not reasonable (e.g. a million years to do X) then the bill is also repealed.
But even that's going to break down, if administered by idiots.
Consider the erosion of congressional oversight of military actions over that last 100 years. Do you think we'd have troops in combat all over the globe right now if Congress had to vote on the actions taking place? What congressman would vote to put Americans in danger to "train" the Nigerian army?