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There has got to be a way of preventing "bundling". Bundling unrelated laws together is the cause of so much strife. Tacking shitty laws onto good ones, sneaki

There has got to be a way of preventing "bundling". Bundling unrelated laws together is the cause of so much strife. Tacking shitty laws onto good ones, sneaking in some obscure clause that gives some senator a tax break that nobody noticed or they ignore because they want the rest of the bill, a highly favorable bi-partisan bill turned into a partisan issue because a clause that furthers the interests of the party that introduced it, and inane strawman accusations that follow because now it's easy to paint someone as the bad guy that is trying to undermine this universally good bill (nevermind that their holdup is this one completely unrelated clause). The whole quid-pro-quo political economy exists because this is possible (I vote for your bill with your pet clause, and you vote for mine.) A big part of the deterioration of current state of political discourse in the US could be attributed to this one issue. I have no conception of how such a limit on the content of bills could be defined and enforced while maintaining the balance of power, but the current system is insanity.

wahern 8y ago
One of the most prominent recent efforts was the line-item veto, but the Supreme Court (rightly) said that it requires a constitutional amendment. You also have to be careful what you wish for. For years everybody bemoaned so-called earmarking. Congress finally prohibited earmarking in their procedures. But many academics have suggested that an unintended consequence was less compromise and greater partisanship in Congress. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earmark_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earmark_(politics) At the end of the day lawmaking and especially budgeting is fundamentally an ugly business. We should be careful about being overly cynical or fatalistic about it. The most important thing is transparency, but that requires the electorate to be more practically minded and less idealistic.
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  There's a difference between allowing a line-item veto (which is a very bad, dangerous thing) and something which prevents unrelated legislation from being packaged together.
- infogulch 8y ago
  Line-item veto sounds interesting, but extremely dangerous. Some bills meanings and intent could be completely reversed by vetoing a single provision in e.g. definitions section. This wouldn't fix the bundling issue, it would just make the president another party in it, and give them super-congressman powers with the ability to essentially make legislature all by themselves. (And the first couple of paragraphs on the wikipedia article [1] confirm this.) You're right about being careful what you wish for. That's half of the reason why I didn't try to present a solution: the problem is conceptually clear, but any specific solution will be muddied by the complexities of reality. Here's my idea anyway: an independent legislative committee whose purpose is to find bundling in bills and can split/veto/force a rewrite before it can be voted on. A supermajority vote can override it. While we're at it, lets also task it with creating an official name that describes the bill without "cutsie" nicknames that misrepresent the content. But as with most "do it with a committee" solutions, this just pushes the problem down a level. We still need solid definitions for things like "bundled" and "related" and "representative" and a way to evaluate the effectiveness of the committee and to challenge their decisions (supreme court? ugh). So I guess this is less a solution and more just a different way to describe the problem. Feel free to tear the above apart, but that's kind of the point. I'm glad I'm not the one making laws. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_S...
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Line-item veto sounds interesting, but extremely dangerous. Some bills meanings and intent could be completely reversed by vetoing a single provision in e.g. definitions section. Line-item veto, both where currently used in states (for the most part, Wisconsin seems to be a radical exception) and when it was (unconstitutionally) adopted at the federal level, does not allow that. It allows separate veto of individual appropriations of money within a bill that included one or more appropriations. It doesn't allow separate veto of arbitrary provisions of law. This can still drastically alter the intent of a bill, but not it in the way you suggest.
kd5bjo 8y ago
Lots of stuff [1] is passed in a batched consensus process, where any member can have one of the consensus items separated into a separate vote. You could extend this idea by letting a sub majority (1/3 maybe) split bills apart to be voted on separately. [1] Ratifying the previous day's minutes, for example

wahern 8y ago

One of the most prominent recent efforts was the line-item veto, but the Supreme Court (rightly) said that it requires a constitutional amendment. You also have to be careful what you wish for. For years everybody bemoaned so-called earmarking. Congress finally prohibited earmarking in their procedures. But many academics have suggested that an unintended consequence was less compromise and greater partisanship in Congress. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earmark_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earmark_(politics) At the end of the day lawmaking and especially budgeting is fundamentally an ugly business. We should be careful about being overly cynical or fatalistic about it. The most important thing is transparency, but that requires the electorate to be more practically minded and less idealistic.

stochastic_monk 8y ago
There's a difference between allowing a line-item veto (which is a very bad, dangerous thing) and something which prevents unrelated legislation from being packaged together.
infogulch 8y ago
Line-item veto sounds interesting, but extremely dangerous. Some bills meanings and intent could be completely reversed by vetoing a single provision in e.g. definitions section. This wouldn't fix the bundling issue, it would just make the president another party in it, and give them super-congressman powers with the ability to essentially make legislature all by themselves. (And the first couple of paragraphs on the wikipedia article [1] confirm this.) You're right about being careful what you wish for. That's half of the reason why I didn't try to present a solution: the problem is conceptually clear, but any specific solution will be muddied by the complexities of reality. Here's my idea anyway: an independent legislative committee whose purpose is to find bundling in bills and can split/veto/force a rewrite before it can be voted on. A supermajority vote can override it. While we're at it, lets also task it with creating an official name that describes the bill without "cutsie" nicknames that misrepresent the content. But as with most "do it with a committee" solutions, this just pushes the problem down a level. We still need solid definitions for things like "bundled" and "related" and "representative" and a way to evaluate the effectiveness of the committee and to challenge their decisions (supreme court? ugh). So I guess this is less a solution and more just a different way to describe the problem. Feel free to tear the above apart, but that's kind of the point. I'm glad I'm not the one making laws. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_S...
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Line-item veto sounds interesting, but extremely dangerous. Some bills meanings and intent could be completely reversed by vetoing a single provision in e.g. definitions section. Line-item veto, both where currently used in states (for the most part, Wisconsin seems to be a radical exception) and when it was (unconstitutionally) adopted at the federal level, does not allow that. It allows separate veto of individual appropriations of money within a bill that included one or more appropriations. It doesn't allow separate veto of arbitrary provisions of law. This can still drastically alter the intent of a bill, but not it in the way you suggest.

kd5bjo 8y ago

Lots of stuff [1] is passed in a batched consensus process, where any member can have one of the consensus items separated into a separate vote. You could extend this idea by letting a sub majority (1/3 maybe) split bills apart to be voted on separately. [1] Ratifying the previous day's minutes, for example