Wouldn't a simple fix for things like this be 'only allow a new law proposal to be about a single topic and nothing else'?
Single-subject rules are adopted in many state, and they are neither complete solutions (viewing substantive subject-mixing as a problem), nor without their own potential problems. (And, anyway, to actually be mandatory, for Congress such a rule would have to be adopted through Constitutional amendment.)
Further, its quite arguable that substantive subject mixing is not a problem, poor representation is, and trying to limit substantive subject mixing just creates a new problem; where reps are effectively representing the interests of their district, why shouldn't they be able to effectively legislate based on considerations like:
1. X, considered alone, is better for those I represent, on balance, than not-X, and should be supported, and
2. Y, considered alone, is worse for those I represent, on balance, than not-Y, and should be opposed, but
3. X with Y, considered together, is better for those I represent than not-X with not-Y, thus, the combination of X and Y should be supported if X cannot be secured alone.
(While other representatives, with different constituents with different interests, see the same thing, but with X and Y reversed?)
If you could effectively prohibit subject mixing, that would prohibit compromises that are net gains for larger groups, even if smaller gains for the most-favored groups.
(Systems with parliamentary government with explicit coalition building essentially do massive subject mixing up-front in deciding the agenda of the coalition government when it is formed, and thus can avoid the need to do subject mixing when it comes to individual bills; the U.S. system works more on ad hoc coalition building, so the compromises are more on individual bills than anything analogous to the formation of a government in a parliamentary system.)
On budgetary matters, sure. You want to combine efforts to get legislation through that benefits your constituency even if it's a lot more costly than it would be if you could get your measure approved by itself. An example would be Congressman A has a bunch of people complaining about the all the dangerous intersections in their state, Congressman B has a bunch of bridges that are falling apart, so the two get together and create a Federal Road Improvements Act or whatever to appropriate budget for what is now being considered a nation concern. This is a logical place for riders as it allows federal budgeting to have the greatest reach it can for helping the states.
There is substantially less logical argument when the riders concern law. From your example, if a law ever put a congressman's constituency worse off than they were before, there is no time when that representative should support it. Creating an environment of sweeping bad law into bills set to pass is inherently dangerous because once in place, laws are considered correct until properly invalidated.
But the nature of these riders is different still. This is law being thrown into budget. Just like the super controversial sections in the 2012 NDAA, these are mixing two very different types of bills. Having law riders is dangerous enough as it is, but allowing them to be thrown into budgetary bills that must pass is just insane.
The problem is there is currently no delineation in congress between the two types of bills. Everything they do whether budgetary or policy based is law and is generally "over the head of us simple minded folk" so they have leveraged a tremendous amount of freedom in the way that they can push things through regardless of how much sense anything they do ultimately makes.
I think the first-step solution would be to separate bill types and only allow appropriation riders on budgetary matters and no riders when it comes to new law/policy. If that is too complicated for them, they shouldn't be law makers.
Combined Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act
Stuffing projects into the budget happens all the time. Basically, no one will negotiate in good faith on the merits of individual proposals so they play these tricks to get things passed into law.
Definitely not what I came up with...
Those traditions and rules are good, which is why they exist in the first place. But they're not really binding or legally required.
Which, if you think about it, makes sense. Congress is the ultimate lawmaking authority in the land--who is going to tell Congress what they can't do? The only answers are the Constitution and the voters. The Constitution sets some limits on powers, but doesn't micromanage process. And the voters tend to care about issues, not process.
For CISA specifically, it had already passed both houses; adding it to the omnibus does not accomplish anything that was not already going to happen anyway. The text changes that tptacek details so thoroughly are the sorts of things that could easily happen in conference committee. Sticking it into the omnibus is mostly a matter of convenience at this point.
In the end, Congressional leaders negotiated the omnibus, will allow it on the floor, and the full Congress will vote on it. This is the same bar than any piece of legislation must get over on its own.
And there were nasty bills that did not make it into the omnibus, like de-funding Planned Parenthood.
edit: tpacek, Im not asking him in terms of his own opinion, but rather what "nasty" he found in those bills.
His post was very informative that's why I asked. I couldn't care less what he thinks about the subject of PP.
A more neutral word to make the same point would be "controversial." I probably should have written that instead.
This is unsupported by evidence or reason.
How do you define "a single topic"? Who gets to decide what is and isn't topical? Who gets to enforce it? Can you see how this definition might be abused for political gain?
Myself, I see it only making things worse.
The original bill. As in, no riders at all.
"Party X votes no in favor of bill Z, but we will vote again if you introduce bill Y which is the exact same as bill Z except with a new section funding for building a shipyard in the congressional district of a popular guy in Party X"
Aside from moving part of the action from formal amendment processes to informal processes, I don't see what change that gets you.
How?
Unless you can show how it could make the situation actually worse, your argument doesn't hold.
It would at least be "as bad as now" or better.
Easy. If 1/3 of Congress votes for something to be split, then it's split. (Kind of the opposite of the 2/3 super majority rule.)
As simple as that. Let the people actually voting decide if something is a single topic.
Yes, this could lead to nonsense where people split things to insane levels just to disrupt things, but I suspect it would not come to that because they would be ridiculed, and it would be just a waste of time for them since splitting something doesn't mean it doesn't get voted on in the end.
In addition, as long as the votes for this are public, it seems like it would be harder to defend capricious action for political gain, since anyone could see that this group of senators all voted to split legislation that clearly should not have been split and then take them to task for it. It could even be mandatory that a proposal to split a bill must be accompanied by an explanation (also publicly available) of why it should be split that way. It's one thing in my opinion to put something controversial into an unrelated bill--there will always be people who are in favor of that, so it is politically defensible and can score points--but it is another thing entirely to try to (literally) rationalize the frivolous division of a cohesive bill.
It actually strikes me as quite an elegant solution to the problem of riders and sprawling legislation.
I disagree strongly. I submit that most voters do not follow the legislative process very closely and vote accordingly. Rather, I submit that most voters make decisions emotionally using far less than the totality of the relevant information currently available to them. At this very moment, we have a batch of Congresscritters who gain the support of their constituents by obstructing their opposition by any means possible. Questions of frivolousness or caprice are not considered. This is the situation here, today, and now.
I think your notion fails because it adds extra information that voters will disregard. Because this information will be disregarded, it will not significantly impact the behavior of voters. The net result is likely to be an increased legislative overhead, more procedural tools to be wielded as partisan weapons, and voter behavior not shifting significantly. As a result, the failure mode of this proposal is everything wrong with the current (attaching bill-killing, shutdown-threatening riders) PLUS excessive bill-splitting for the sake of obstruction.
Might I suggest that your solutions should not hinge on sudden and dramatic shifts of voter behavior at a scale of many millions?
The contents of the bill that are actually the changes to the code of law would prescribe how that effect is to occur. I would also like to see bills define, in law, how they are funded (even if that is, 'this is funded from a general fund').
I think that the above should be true for every level of governance. The bill should be rejected (patch refused), in it's entirety, if any material not 'directly' related to the intended purpose of the bill is within it, or if it conflicts with existing law in a way that is not corrected by the bill's application to the law. This is what the legal system in a given jurisdiction should do. All law would automatically be reviewed for correctness and compatibility.
Oh, what are those last few pages you added? Never you mind, those are tertiary. This is all in the name of protecting the environment, and its citizens, and their metadata...
You haven't really answered these questions. You've just postulated that someone will, implicitly assuming that nobody involved will ever be partisan.
It was passed in 1996, challenged, then struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1998.
Then Nixon tried to exercise his power to target specific projects and congressmen with an aggressive rescission project and Congress changed the system.
The current federal budget process was instituted in that law where Congress first authorizes all plausible spending and then appropriates only a smaller amount dedicated to specific programs and the president must spend that exact amount by law.
Congress tried to compromise between the two systems with a line item veto managed by Congress in 1996. The courts weren't ready to let the executive and legislature share spending power, especially when they were likely to be the referees and the post-1974 system persists.
Or, it persisted until about 1996. In recent years -- including all of the Obama presidency and the latter Bush years -- the Congressional budget process hasn't produced regular appropriations bills and has delivered only irregular authorizations. The process is supposed to produce at least twelve openly debated appropriations bills every year with participation by all of Congress. Instead a new system of continuing resolutions that limit all spending power to the president and the Senate majority leader and the House speaker in secret conferences has taken hold.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impou...
This uses an unusual distinction between "appropriation" and "authorization" (usually, policy language is "authorization", and then actual dedication of money to be spent on an authorized purpose is "appropriation"; CRs are appropriations, not authorizations.)
> The process is supposed to produce at least twelve openly debated appropriations bills every year with participation by all of Congress. Instead a new system of continuing resolutions that limit all spending power to the president and the Senate majority leader and the House speaker in secret conferences has taken hold.
CRs are appropriations. Congress votes on the rules by which CRs are considered, and on the CRs themselves. The negotiations for CRs, as those for regular budgets, often involve the White House and leadership from both Houses of Congress in various configurations, but if Congress chooses not to debate them thoroughly, that's a choice Congress makes. The power is still with the whole body of Congress, even if that body (by a majority in each House) chooses to defer to the leadership in each House.
Often, "additions" are included in these last-second, "must sign" bills because they face resistance and are unlikely to pass on their own. No representative, nor the president want to be responsible for a "government shutdown" so anything that makes it into the last version of the bill is likely to become law.
Riders are a terrible idea. This wiki does a good job at describing them and illustrating that other countries don't like the idea either.
I'd very much like an clear explanation of how the amendment process works.
Floor amendments are voted on just like bills, and require a majority vote to pass. The way that it can be relatively "easy" for certain members to get amendments attached to a bill is in committee, since the committee to which a bill is assigned can either let the original bill languish (though if the rest of the House wants the bill out of committee, it can be pulled out) and adopt and report out an entirely new bill, on the same subject, with amendments, or report out the original bill with committee amendments as a package which are voted on together (this would be part of the rule for the bill, and this rule is, itself, subject to vote.)
It still seems like there's a possibility that a large minority, who will vote against the bill no matter what, can attach a rider that appeals to a subset of the majority that's in favor of the bill but which will make the bill unpalatable to the rest of the supporting majority. But those kind of hypotheticals quickly devolve into complicated strategies, and it's not clear there's a better mechanism than the majority vote.
Define "topic" in a way that still lets legislators write useful laws while unequivocally disallowing the kind of thing you want to try to ban, and you can probably get published in a major poli-sci or philosophy journal.
We can start with this HN thread's subject, which is a budget bill. Can we at least agree that budgets should not touch the U.S. Code? That they should be simply allocating money from the treasury to various programs and agencies previously specified by law?