Clean bills in Congress by SignyM

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Clean bills in Congress

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Friday, October 10, 2008 13:02
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Thursday, October 9, 2008 12:45 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

One of the questions that Obama and McCain were asked was How would you reduce the budget to pay for the bailout That got me thinking....

One of the things that drives me absolutely batshit are those "multi-legged Christmas tree" bills that have so much crap dangling offa them. Even the bailout got loaded with 140 billion in extra junk! It seems to me that if you want to pass sensible bills, instead of adding stuff to them you should strip them down into digestible pieces. For example, the bailout has some very effective, necessary features- increasing deposit insurance, for example. And it has some really onerous ones. The increase in deposit insurance should have had a chance to be considered by itself, as should all of the other parts to the bill.

If there is ANY procedural change in Congress, it should be to deconstruct proposals rather than agglomerating on to them.

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Let's party like its 1929.

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Thursday, October 9, 2008 1:05 PM

RIGHTEOUS9

This is a subject I know very little about...

I don't like how all kinds of shit, from pork to completely unrelated unpopular legislation can be slipped into a bill,

but how do you make a law to stop that, and of course, without a law, why would congress stop doing it?

Isn't one of the problems that bills usually have many expected side-effects, and complications, that require their original bill to possibly tackle many things simultaneously so that the intent of the bill can work? Doesn't that make it impossible to blanketly say that you can't have a bill dealing with more than one subject?

I'm asking, cuz I have no idea.

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Thursday, October 9, 2008 2:07 PM

FREMDFIRMA

Line Item Veto was not necessarily a bad idea, and it's one of the few things I will credit both Reagan and Clinton for wanting and having the good sense to use.

The problem was that petty partisan politics fucked that up, cause the GOP wanted to use it when they were in power to cut out Democrat pork, and then when Clinton started cutting GOP pork they went fucking ballistic and pulled out all the stops trying to shitcan it.

We need to bring that BACK, and refine it some so that once provisions are struck it needs to be re-affirmed in the house and senate (but forbid them to change it at that point) before finally becoming law of the land.

I do believe we can work that into the checks and balances system effectively, and it would go pretty far towards eliminating that kind of crap.

-Frem

It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it

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Thursday, October 9, 2008 2:11 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

If you take a look at any "Energy Bill" that routinely comes up for consideration.... Yes, it's complex. But if requiring improvements in high-tension transmission lines is a good idea so that overloaded lines no longer sag, catch something on fire and then set off a chain-reaction of outages... well, it's a good idea. All by itself.

If you can't justify a stand-alone project, then it prolly shouldn't even be considered.

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Let's party like its 1929.

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Thursday, October 9, 2008 10:28 PM

RIGHTEOUS9

Well the question is to both of you then,

can a line-item veto be used essentially as a poison pill to legislation?

If you fuck up some aspect of the bill, some funding adjustment, etc. can't that terminally effect the whole product?

And for that matter, isn't that the kind of thing that almost neccesitates multi-faceted bills?...we are going to add more money to education(blah blah)...we are going to take that money from transportation...we are going to adjust things in transportation so that the program still "works"

Like I said...I know jack about this, but i'd like to understand it better, if you guys have more info on the subject

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Friday, October 10, 2008 4:39 AM

FREMDFIRMA

Frankly, most legislation SHOULD be poison-pilled.

But the line item veto is one of the rare instances where party coordination is actually useful rather than detrimental - the only way you'd get a bill passed would be for enough folks to actually agree on the damn thing, which is in fact, how it's SUPPOSED to work in practice.

You'd have to dig for it, but within the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debates there's actually quite a bit about this kind of thing, not specifically the line item veto, but how to get anything done when a tiny minority can effectively stonewall it - and while never completely resolved even then, the general conclusion seemed to be that it was better to leave things that way than risk lowering the difficulty and allowing a rogue administration to steamroller us all.

Of course, they did not forsee the blatantly unconstitutional use of the federal register to create executive orders, or so-called signing statements, which have thrown the whole system out of wack over the years, although the Anti-Federalists did see the danger of judicial activism and raised a stink about it, only to be told in fairly patronising terms that it was unrealistic...

By several folk who *IMMEDIATELY* abused it like hell in exactly the fashion they made sure there was no protection against, most noteable among them being John Jay who later became Chief Justice and set about doing exactly the things that he and Hamilton ensured there was no effective check and balance against.
(Not all our Founding Fathers were honest in their dealings with us, and that's a fact.)

So the Constitution isn't perfect, mind you - but the feelings of the folk both for and against it were that when it came to it, better to grant too little power, than too much.

Pat Henry went into some detail about these failings, and a more clear and concise version of that speech exists here.
http://www.wfu.edu/~zulick/340/henry.html

I'd say that given our current state of so many conflicting and often contradictory laws, bills, and regulations - that better indeed too little, than too much, and the States themselves remember, under the 10th Amendment are supposed to make those kind of decisions rather than Congress, a de-facto usurpation everyone else seems to have ignored for a hundred and some years or more.

-Frem

If yer interested in more Pat Henry, you'll find the motherlode here, although not well formatted or as immediately legible.
http://www.constitution.org/afp/phenry00.htm

Would that he were wrong, but history has proven him right in almost every case, often behind even his own worst imaginings.

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Friday, October 10, 2008 5:53 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

What I've found here on the board is that while people may disagree about grand schemes and overarching goals, they can often agree on specifics. So for example, SargeX is a Libertarian, Frem is an Anarchist, and I'm an economic democrat. We can go rounds about "capitalism" and "government"- what it is, what it inevitably trends towards- and get just get spittin' mad at each other, but we can ALL agree to eliminate corporate personhood.

Generally, I like the idea of having an overarching strategy that guides individual activities, making sure that they occur in the right order and that they don't undo each other.

But when you're dealing with contentious issues and philosophies I don't think a universal plan is possible. At that point, I think it's up to each party to develop IT'S OWN plan, and vote for those specifdic items that "fit".

The one item that should require overall coordination is the budget. But frankly, the way the budget looks now I'd be willing to go with piecemeal creation because it couldn't possibly get any worse!

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Let's party like its 1929.

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Friday, October 10, 2008 6:06 AM

RIGHTEOUS9

Okay,

but politics being what they are...

isn't it likely that if you do things this way,

you get a bill passed, because the concept is wildly popular...one party doesnt' put up much of a fight, even though it doesn't like it, a few vote for it...

then you get to the next bill that is going to make a portion of it work,

that part doesn't pass, because the other party wants the effect of the law to fail, because they want to blame the other party for using bad judgement, for writing and passing into law, something that worked horribly, and cost the tax payers money.

in this way, the other party doesn't oppose the spirit of the bill(which may have been politically damaging), but they do kill the spirit of the bill, in some obscure addition that is hard for the public to follow how it connects.

edit to ad,

and isn't this just as true of a line item veto?

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Friday, October 10, 2008 7:48 AM

KWICKO

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, Reagan's presidential campaign manager & CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)

Righteous:

Maybe this will help answer your questions:

Say you have a bill which would be of great benefit to, say, the Northern states, but of no real benefit to the Southernn states (this is just a bare-bones example, no agenda to push at all). While it is of no benefit to the Southern states, it's also not harmful to them.

How do you get them to support that bill? Easy - you give them something that THEY want, something that's of benefit to THEIR states, so that they'll vote your way on this bill. Sometimes that's a promise to support (or at least not oppose) another bill that they have introduced (or are preparing to introduce), and sometimes it's in the form of amendments and addendums to the existing bill you want their support for. So you have to add things to sweeten the deal for them. You add "sweeteners" or "pork" to the bill, and so does everyone else who would benefit from it, hoping to get everyone on the same side of the fence.

And you end up with a bill that, instead of costing, say, $150 million and doing one very important thing, now costs some $290 billion and tries to do EVERYTHING - and does none of it very well, including the original thing it was supposed to do, because the wording has been changed just to make everyone happy. Or make them not so UNhappy that they would vote against the bill.

OR you get one person with principles who attaches a "poison pill" amendment or rider to the bill - something so egregious and hateful and expensive that it's guaranteed to either kill the bill outright in Congress (meaning nowhere near enough votes would be cast to pass it), or something that the President is practically guaranteed to veto. That's part of the "nuclear option" on these kinds of things. If you can take a bill that has grown so large as to become distasteful to many in Congress, and then add just that one more thing to make it even worse, you can effectively kill that bill. But you run the risk of being labeled as "against" something which most people were for, simply because you voted against it on principle because of one or two things you just couldn't vote for.

Does that help at all? It IS very confusing trying to figure out the parliamentary procedures that are followed, and the many ways to sneak a bill through or to make sure it dies an ignoble death...

Mike

This world is a comedy for those who think, and a tragedy for those who feel.

Trolls Against McCain!

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Friday, October 10, 2008 7:59 AM

RIGHTEOUS9

That does help to clarify the bill-passing proccess, and to empahsize some of the obvious problems with it, so thanks Kwicko,

but it doesn't show me how a line item veto or completely streamlined bills would not be problematic in themselves,

I'm just still not sure I see these other obstacles as being better than current ones

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Friday, October 10, 2008 8:47 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I guess part of the issue is how to define "completely streamlined". Obviously, the people who draft the bill should put in everything THEY think is necessary for implementation, and perhaps the draft will be necessarily complex.

I guess what I'm saying is that what I would like to see is not so much a change in the bills as introduced (altho that woudl be good too!) but in the PROCESS they go thru to get passed. Perhaps a procedural rule change would work. Maybe by saying that any ammendments must make the bill shorter, not longer!

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Let's party like its 1929.

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Friday, October 10, 2008 12:02 PM

KWICKO

The only real problem I have with the line-item veto is that it puts all the power in the hands of the President (like we need more of that). If a bill comes to his desk, he can just start marking out parts of it at will, anything he doesn't like, and that's that.

If it were done as Frem suggested, where it would have to go back through BOTH houses of Congress afterward for review and a new vote with no further changes or amendments being allowed, that would be a good step forward.

What I *really* wish would happen would be that we'd just get some clean bills once in a while, without all the extra garbage piled on them. But that's probably asking too much...

Mike

This world is a comedy for those who think, and a tragedy for those who feel.

Trolls Against McCain!

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Friday, October 10, 2008 1:02 PM

FREMDFIRMA

We do Mikey, usually introduced by Paul or Kucinich, and without fail ignored or sneered at because...

A - It usually makes sense instead of burying the meaning under six layers of legalese doubletalk which could in fact mean anything at all.

B - It has no juicy pork to benefit them personally.

C - It usually involves their little aristocratic oligarchy losing something, money, power or the ability to thumb their nose at us peons and the law.

It was the intention that any function of this government, from the highest to the lowest, be clearly understandable even to those possessing a bare minimum of education or even none at all.

Jefferson alluded to this somewhere (it ties in with his talk of how folks cannot be well informed and thus revolts are to be expected from time to time) but I cannot for the life of me remember enough of it to dig the exact quotes up at the moment.

I think that we ought to have a randomly selected eighth grader read each bill as it is submitted, and if they cannot make sense of it, it should then be rejected and shitcanned on the spot.

And yes, that's partially cribbed from The Evil Overlord Handbook, Section #12.
"One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation."

-Frem
"It's not that they're evil which bothers me, as they are incompetent, and above all things, I loathe incompetence."

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