Professor Foley has some thoughts on Senator Lee’s and Rep. Hensarling’s proposal.
And Mia Love wants to simplify legislation.
The latter is a great idea, but it’s going to be really hard to come up with a way to enforce single-issue that the porkers and get-along-to-go-alongers won’t find a way to circumvent.
Washington State has a ‘Single Subject’ rule. It does kind of work in that you don’t tend to end up with the giant Omnibus Everything bills.
But we also have an Initiative process. The same ‘Single Subject’ rule used against initiatives are used on a sort of pedantic “You used the word -and-!!!” basis where the porkers et al. are able to stretch things much farther.
So: Amazing double standard. But the bribes on the “transportation bill” are at least vaguely “transportation”.
My dad’s long-standing suggestion has been that any bill must be presented written long-hand by the congresscritter doing the proposing.
If nothing else it shortens the bills.
A related idea I have often mentioned — any bill should be read aloud on the floor before being voted on, in its final form after all amendments, a quorum required to be present throughout.
Both eliminates the ‘but we didn’t read it’ defense, eliminates those mysterious redrafting changes, and sharply limits the length of bills
I would love it if Senator Lee would push for a Constitutional sundown amendment. Every twenty five years a CFR title or two gets rebooted from a blank piece of paper. Sometimes the accretion layers must have a needle gun taken to them.
This sounds like Downsize DC’s single subject bill – in fact, it may be.
Would love to see it pass, probably won’t though. And even if it did, the pessimist in me suspects they would mostly find ways around it.
Case in point: Colorado’s Emergency Clause, which states that all bills be subject to waiting periods and citizen review – unless it is an emergency. So, every bill passed by the legislature has the word “Emergency” in the title, or however they designate it so. Every bill. And no governor has ever vetoed a bill for carrying that title and most citizens do not even know about this, outside of a few activists. The press mostly ignores it.
So, call me cynical.