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5,500 pages of bridging votes? A bill that's so large that people literally don't have the ability to read it before they vote on it? Policy negotiations are no

5,500 pages of bridging votes? A bill that's so large that people literally don't have the ability to read it before they vote on it? Policy negotiations are normal. This is not normal. I mean, heck, why bring up separate bills in Congress at all? Let's put off all legislation for the entire year and then we'll pass everything as one bill when it comes time for the spending bill. We don't even need to meet during the year, we'll just do the entire process via backroom deals and give people a few hours to sign on before they vote yes or no on everything for the entire year. It's not a broken legislative system, it's just compromise! /s Yes bills are complicated, yes, compromise is necessary, but also there are obvious lines we can cross where there's no reason for a bill to be so bloated and discordant, and this bill crosses those lines.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> 5,500 pages of bridging votes? I'm not defending omnibus bills here nor was I above. I was defending pork. Even small bills are susceptible to legislation unrelated to the headline title sneaking in. That isn't always a bad thing. > there are obvious lines we can cross where there's no reason for a bill to be so bloated and discordant Conciseness takes work. Messes are easy. Rushed bills are heavy because the work of whittling it down hasn't been done. In this case, I happened to be close to a senior Senate staffer as this bill was getting wrapped up. The way it works is each team takes a section and masters it. Tracks it from start to finish, keeps tabs on interested and affected parties, and reaches out to experts for clarification where necessary. This gets compiled into notes for senior staffers who distill it into policy and negotiating points for the elected. When I asked detailed question about the bill, knowledgeable answers came back within minutes. There is no Gell-Mann amnesia, at least not on this Senator's team. Anybody claiming they didn't have time to review the legislation is lying, unprepared or incompetent. I agree something is given up by not having any single person with complete knowledge of the bill. But in a crisis, you don't have a choice between a concise non-existent bill and the hodgepodge. It's between the uncased sausage and going hungry. This was a self-inflicted crisis. There were months to do what was pushed against a deadline. In that, I find institutional failing. But given the deadline and the process, a big bill with some junk in it is not a bad outcome.
- danShumway 6y ago
  > But given the deadline and the process, a big bill with some junk in it is not a bad outcome. It's a terrible outcome, you just may have not had a better one available to you. But let's not mince words, a 5500 page bill that no one has read in its entirety and that Congresspeople are blindly voting on because they literally do not have any other choice except to shut down the government during a pandemic -- that is a bad outcome. > There were months to do what was pushed against a deadline. In that, I find institutional failing. I strongly agree. I think where we differ is that I'm looking at the end result of that process as the fruits of that institutional failing, not as some kind of heroic last-minute turnaround that saved the day. I don't mean to disparage the work you or others put in here, but you can have a multi-month project that gets ignored until the last week and you can accurately say at that point that there's no other choice but to throw something together in a few days to satisfy the requirements, and you might even do something incredible to get any finished project at all. But that doesn't mean the result isn't terrible. I'm not giving anybody kudos over this, people should be looking at this result and saying, "something is seriously wrong with our political system that a bill like this is what we ended up with." That should be the main takeaway. A political system that only works during crisis, and that can only get the legislation passed when there's no other choice except to shut down the government -- that's a broken political system. It's not something anyone at any point in the process should be proud of.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> 5,500 pages of bridging votes? I'm not defending omnibus bills here nor was I above. I was defending pork. Even small bills are susceptible to legislation unrelated to the headline title sneaking in. That isn't always a bad thing. > there are obvious lines we can cross where there's no reason for a bill to be so bloated and discordant Conciseness takes work. Messes are easy. Rushed bills are heavy because the work of whittling it down hasn't been done. In this case, I happened to be close to a senior Senate staffer as this bill was getting wrapped up. The way it works is each team takes a section and masters it. Tracks it from start to finish, keeps tabs on interested and affected parties, and reaches out to experts for clarification where necessary. This gets compiled into notes for senior staffers who distill it into policy and negotiating points for the elected. When I asked detailed question about the bill, knowledgeable answers came back within minutes. There is no Gell-Mann amnesia, at least not on this Senator's team. Anybody claiming they didn't have time to review the legislation is lying, unprepared or incompetent. I agree something is given up by not having any single person with complete knowledge of the bill. But in a crisis, you don't have a choice between a concise non-existent bill and the hodgepodge. It's between the uncased sausage and going hungry. This was a self-inflicted crisis. There were months to do what was pushed against a deadline. In that, I find institutional failing. But given the deadline and the process, a big bill with some junk in it is not a bad outcome.

danShumway 6y ago
> But given the deadline and the process, a big bill with some junk in it is not a bad outcome. It's a terrible outcome, you just may have not had a better one available to you. But let's not mince words, a 5500 page bill that no one has read in its entirety and that Congresspeople are blindly voting on because they literally do not have any other choice except to shut down the government during a pandemic -- that is a bad outcome. > There were months to do what was pushed against a deadline. In that, I find institutional failing. I strongly agree. I think where we differ is that I'm looking at the end result of that process as the fruits of that institutional failing, not as some kind of heroic last-minute turnaround that saved the day. I don't mean to disparage the work you or others put in here, but you can have a multi-month project that gets ignored until the last week and you can accurately say at that point that there's no other choice but to throw something together in a few days to satisfy the requirements, and you might even do something incredible to get any finished project at all. But that doesn't mean the result isn't terrible. I'm not giving anybody kudos over this, people should be looking at this result and saying, "something is seriously wrong with our political system that a bill like this is what we ended up with." That should be the main takeaway. A political system that only works during crisis, and that can only get the legislation passed when there's no other choice except to shut down the government -- that's a broken political system. It's not something anyone at any point in the process should be proud of.