We should outlaw bills like these.
The title of this post is: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming
Are you sure? Why are we passing completely new laws in our yearly budget bill? What does streaming laws have to do with paying forestry service janitors?
Maybe we wouldn't have a government shutdown emergency every year if our representatives didn't try to shoehorn their pet laws and their <strike>customers'</strike>lobbyists' favorite regulations in at the same time.
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Laws_governing_the_initiative_proces...
They aren't forced to, except by their own (collective) consent. They could vote to split the bill, propose smaller bills and vote down the bigger ones in preference, etc.
Conglomerate bills are a tool to reach mutually tolerable compromise.
This is just politispeak for quid-pro-quo. If conglomerate bills are outlawed then maybe we can vote on issues instead of on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched.
And what I'm saying is this never happens in America. Politics is a team sport and voters just blame the other team. We've just had the worst pandemic in living memory and the worst economic contraction in a generation and nearly every Senator won re-election despite months of inaction.
Yes, compromise and quid-pro-quo are the same thing. So what?
> If conglomerate bills are outlawed then maybe we can vote on issues instead of on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched.
You are voting on issues either way, and, cynically, voting on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched, either way. A single subject rule, such as is in place in the California legislature and several other state legislatures, simply reduces scope within which compromise can occur (or, alternatively, just makes the legislative compromises more complex and opaque as mechanisms are found to obey the technical requirements of the rule while evading its substantive intent, such as building in contingencies in one bill that are triggered by the passage or not of another bill.)
Quid-pro-quo isn't the problem, being able to trade-off across issues is a good thing.
The problem is legislators serving powerful narrow interests rather than the broad public interest, but narrowing the permitted scope of individual enactments doesn't do anything to help that.
It can be a good thing sometimes. But it can be also used for "do the thing you'd otherwise never agree to for your thing to pass" which is more of an ultimatum. Or even, "yeah, and add an aircraft carrier to that" to block some effort completely. (I think that was a recent relief bill, but can't find the link now)