That seems silly to me. Is every bill supposed to be perfect the first time? Amendments exist so that people concerns with a bill can be addressed. Getting rid of them would simply prolong the process of passing laws.
"The Act was passed on the last day before Congress adjourned for the 2006 elections. According to Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), no one on the Senate-House Conference Committee had seen the final language of the bill before it was passed.[4][5] The Economist has written that these provisions were "hastily tacked onto the end of unrelated legislation"."
Edit to add: I agree that the ability to amend bills shouldn't be removed entirely, but it certainly needs an overhaul.
> Getting rid of them would simply prolong the process of passing laws.
Sounds good to me! If I ever run for office (ha!), I'd run on a platform of reducing the number of outstanding laws -- e.g. every new law passed requires two antiquated laws to be rescinded. Plus, as a side benefit, we could massively reduce the amount of quid pro quo pork added via amendments. Consider it the legal version of "My net programming contribution this week was -2000 lines of code." [1]
I often hear people say things like, "If Republicans and Democrats (or the house and senate) could work together, they'd get a lot more done.", and I think to myself, "Is a 'productive' congress one that passes thousands of pages of legislation?".
Bills are like diffs. They are not law, they merely make changes to the laws that exist. Some bills will add new files to the working repository, others will delete files. The diff isn't the code.
That's a deeply insightful observation about my analogy... thanks! </s>
The point was: Continuously bolting on new {law, code} tends to monotonically increase a system's complexity. Many people consider unnecessary complexity "bad." I'm one of those people.
Perhaps in the house, but in the senate they're often used as a political tool rather than to address legitimate concerns with a bill. It's a shady way of making laws.
Whether the ability to add amendments prolongs or delays the passing of laws, that's a tough one.
"The Act was passed on the last day before Congress adjourned for the 2006 elections. According to Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), no one on the Senate-House Conference Committee had seen the final language of the bill before it was passed.[4][5] The Economist has written that these provisions were "hastily tacked onto the end of unrelated legislation"."
Edit to add: I agree that the ability to amend bills shouldn't be removed entirely, but it certainly needs an overhaul.