I haven’t gone back to look for it, but I think I published an article a few years back suggesting that Congress and the various state legislatures pull back a bit and keep bills clean and lean. A spending bill should be a spending bill…a defense bill should be a defense bill…and an education bill should be an education bill. That we should avoid the omnibus catch all bills that sometimes result in someone having to vote against a bill they generally support because of an onerous add on or holding their nose and allowing some piece of shit sneak throw on a valuable bit of legislation.
It also clouds what a legislator supports…I love xyz…but you voted against it…well I had to because rst was stuck to the bill and I can’t support that.
And it helps make vetoes easier to overcome or maybe even prevent if a bill stays on topic. And quite frankly I’d think it would be easier to write bills, negotiate bills, get them out of committee, and approved if they were what they were.
And apparently some of the discussion in Washington this week has shone some light on that concept for at least one Republican Senator:
“I’ve come to believe that we would do a lot better and we’d have a lot more bipartisanship and bipartisan success if we legislated at a slightly more granular level,” Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) said in an interview with Yahoo Finance.
He calls the approach a “confidence-building exercise and one that would allow us to realize that there’s a lot that can be done if we don’t tie everything to everything else.”
Lee is chairman of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee and Utah’s senior senator. He also sits on the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees and has been a close ally of President Trump during his four years in office.
Given the political will something like this wouldn’t be that hard to accomplish. It wouldn’t require actual legislation but just changes in House and Senate rules. Yes I know that would mean some pork would have to get left in the committee rooms…but for a more transparent and smooth running Congress…it is time to adopt an era of clean bills.
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