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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Yay, let's tack on a bunch of controversial and useless junk onto a vital transportation bill so it risks being voted against and or vetoed.

If these ideas were so great they would be able to stand on their own in their own bill and be debated about. But instead, no, let's tack them onto military budgets/transportation funding/education bills, you know, stuff that people often won't vote against.

Most other countries frankly don't allow this. A bill or act has a single theme and a single mandate. I don't understand why the US allows it, and it screams of corruption/bribery/etc.

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It may be more common in other countries than you think.

Canada's recent Conservative government got in the habit of using massive "omnibus" budget bills to pass contentious laws alongside necessary budget legislation when they were a minority government that needed the support of opposition members of parliament to legislate.

That government has just recently been replaced by a majority Liberal government, which is unlikely to continue the practice, as they no longer need opposition support to pass legislation. The ruling party has enough MPs that in practice the government should be able to do whatever it wants for the next four years.

Reposting from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10331848

That is kinda how political negotiation works. One side says, "We want X." The other side says, "Ok, we'll support X if it also has Y." Repeat that, in this case for a few years, and you have a very large number of Y's.

The problem with saying this,

> Because tons of it is likely to be things that would not pass if they were part of small little individual deals where the vested interests were not so huge.

Is that the thing that potentially would pass would never make it out to see the daylight without negotiation, which is how you get the things that potentially wouldn't pass stand-alone. (And I say potentially, because for every person we're probably talking about different things.)

> One side says, "We want X." The other side says, "Ok, we'll support X if it also has Y." Repeat that, in this case for a few years, and you have a very large number of Y's.

Why don't they separate these into distinct pieces of legislation (or whatever the term may be), and tie the votes for each together?

Someone should write a law about this...

So we have two things, X and Y. What happens now is that those get bound together into a single bill, (X, Y), which then gets collectively voted on.

Your proposal seems to be to instead maintain them as separate bills, (X) and (Y), which are still collectively voted on?

If I understood it correctly, that distinction makes little difference since the line-item veto was introduced. It would provide better conceptual separation and to allow multiple bill titles; that's about it. It would basically be the equivalent of introducing modules or namespaces into legislation.

Except, obviously, X and Y could have different outcomes.

If someone can vote for X and not for Y, then they're being voted on separately, not collectively.

> It would provide better conceptual separation and to allow multiple bill titles

Correct, and (IANAP) when laws get looked at at a later time, it's easier to understand what's in them. Like how single responsibility principle can make code audits easier.

Also if agreements need to be renewed, you have more composable pieces of law.

I am not a lawyer or politician, so all of this is probably unfeasible for other reasons.

the distinction does make a difference for the legislative branch, which does not have a line-item veto.

Let's assume that X is 'punish pedophiles' and Y is 'allow corporations to dispose of 10% more toxic waste in upstream waters without liability if they own the surrounding land for up to two miles.'

Then if a legislator votes against the bill they have voted against punishing pedophiles, that's not going to look too good around election time. This puts more power in the Executive branch, and means essentially you're depending on the Executive's good will not to allow corporations to dispose of 10% more toxic waste.

That's entirely missing the point that (X) and (Y) would still be collectively voted. If they weren't collectively voted, then we end up at exactly where we are now. (That is, political negotation will result in (X, Y), not an independent (X) and (Y).)

Yes but that's entirely missing the original point that how X and Y are packaged affect the possibilities of negotiation.

If you have two separate bills X and Y and X is a thing that lots of people want and Y is a thing that few people want and you are negotiating to get people to support Y your pledge to support X is not going to do much for you because

1. Lots of people are going to support X, X doesn't need you. 2. People who don't support X will be campaigned against for not supporting X. 3. People who support Y will be campaigned against for supporting Y.

So, if it were possible to put the highly unpopular Y together with the highly popular X in such a way that in order to support X which you want to do and which everyone wants you to do you also have to support Y the chance of Y getting through has increased by a great deal. Sure there will have to be collective voting on the combined XY and the combined XY will be less popular than X by itself, thus people may now actually have to make deals to support XY but not as great a deal as they would have had to make to support Y by itself ( especially as supporting Y by itself was probably dead in the water)

This is what the original comment was complaining about, what my example was meant to highlight and yes, either way will require collective voting and bargaining, but if you can slip Y in with X instead of bargaining on them separately you may be able to achieve your goal of passing Y, otherwise there would be a very real chance that you would not be able to come up with sweet enough deals to do that.

Any bill that is that important and that uncontroversial has got a lot of political potential energy. And that means that politicians can take some of that lack-of-opposition, add some pork, and wind up with a personal benefit and a slightly-less-unopposed bill.

The end-point of this process is that most bills will barely pass, unless they're so hot politically that it's easy to attack someone over messing with it (think some of the post-9/11 terrorism related votes).

Apparently there are fixes for this even in our own country. Oregon's state legislature, for instance, has a clause which says what the bill is about. Any amendments that don't meet that qualification are not allowed to be tacked on.

> I don't understand why the US allows it, and it screams of corruption/bribery/etc.

Seems to me like you understand it completely. The US is, like most countries, mired in a bit of corruption/bribery/etc. I am of the opinion this is simply part of the human condition, and is virtually impossible to eliminate.

It didn't used to be this bad in the US, and there are many countries where it isn't like this. Corruption needs to be fought against, not apologized for.

I'm not sure when you think corruption began in the US, but I'm certain you're naive and wrong.

Diseases aren't cured by people who think they're incurable.

And your opinion effectively defends the status quo, which, if it needed defending, it wouldn't be the status quo.

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