> How do you define single issue? - Everything in the bill should be able to be summarized by a one-paragraph, three-sentence, no-semicolons abstract relating

> How do you define single issue? - Everything in the bill should be able to be summarized by a one-paragraph, three-sentence, no-semicolons abstract relating the purpose of the bill. None of the content of the bill should be surprising given that abstract — it should "follow from" the abstract. - The abstract's sentences must all be logically connected, able to be diagrammed as a causal network. There can't be one sentence that introduces some completely independent purpose from the purpose discussed in the other two sentences. You can't say "We want to build a bridge. Also, we want to buy some tanks." — nothing connects those two concepts into a single coherent purpose. But you can say "We want to buy some tanks. We also want to build test ranges for those tanks." — the two concepts are connected and form a single coherent purpose. > Take a budget bill. No, don't take "a budget bill." The whole purpose of Congress as a social technology is to output a budget; every bill Congress evaluates is for the purpose of defining the budget. Congress should not be passing "a budget" through one bill, any more than a software company should be making a release every few months that entirely rewrites their whole product line from scratch with no code reuse. Bills should represent discrete patches to the budget (implying also: to the executive departments and regulations funded by said budget), and should be debated the same way that e.g. Linux kernel patches are debated on LKML — including being rejected as "too big to be debated"! And this perspective — of the whole of the legislative process being "about" the creation of a budget — should be burned into the process itself: no bill should be allowed to be introduced that "defunds" something without also excising the law that defined that thing; no law should be allowed to be introduced that "creates" something without also appropriately funding that thing. The legislature should be ACID — a bill should never leave the law in an inconsistent state (inconsistent between the set of laws, and the budget defined to "power" those laws.) To be clear, that debate would not be line-item level — five fighter jets, three waste-treatment plants, twenty FDA auditors, etc. But it should be confined to a set of things that, as above, can be summarized coherently; and which can also be discussed and debated coherently, with the same set of experts needed to read and analyze the validity of every line-item involved in the bill. Compare/contrast the court system: nobody involved would think that doing a single court case that evaluates 1. whether a company is committing accounting fraud; 2. whether its founder assaulted someone, and 3. whether another founder should get custody of their kids, would be a good idea. Those three questions each imply separate judges with different specialties, separate sets of expert witnesses, separate jury selection processes, and separate lawyers that each side would want to retain. (And, in fact, separate defendants!) And yet, in legislature, we see bills that do exactly this.