[LinkLink]

There really does need to be a limit on bill length https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/7776... For anyone who was riding their high horse on this, the bill is a majority a defense spending bill which includes appropriations of sea territory and military operations. About 3000 pages of spending, and oh but dont kill sharks.

[kleer001]

I'd like to see it as : Ten pages. Plain English. Expected outcome (measured by third party) in a certain length of time. If that doesn't happen then a plan to get rid of the new law.

[ThunderSizzle]

All laws should have automatic termination if not renewed. If it isn't important enough for Congress to keep voting for it, then it's not important enough to keep it as law.

[voakbasda]

Not to mention that such a restriction would put a limit on the number of laws. Eventually they would be forced to choose either to affirm old laws or pass new ones. There would not be enough time for them to do both.

[kleer001]

I mean, there should be a mechanism for it to be moved to long term laws. But yeah, the new ones should all start as short-term to begin with.

As smart as this sounds to me, I'm afraid that it goes against the adversarial tribalism that's baked into humans.

[notfed]

Can ChatGPT help here? (Perhaps it needs an upload document feature?)

[feet]

It would be cool if there were other ways to actually get things passed

[KMag]

To expand a bit more on this, one consequence of increased transparency is fewer back-room deals. This means that instead of one backroom deal getting support for bill A in exchange for support for bill B, and another backroom deal getting support for bill A in exchange for bill C, they now need to comingle bills A, B, and C in order to get them passed in a single transaction.

The short attention span of the electorate and the sound-byte focus of most media means that politicians have a very tough time explaining that they only supported bills B and C because it was a necessary compromise to get A passed.

Transparency is a net positive, but it seems spaghettification of bills in an unforeseen consequence.

[cormacrelf]

This happens to some extent everywhere there is actual democracy going on. Different people care about different stuff, and sometimes they don’t trust each other to hold up each side of the bargain if there’s no legal process binding the deal together. Private people have contracts. Politicians had a need for a similar formal arrangement to make sure the legislation they’re offering isn’t passed without what they’re seeking. They came up with one.

Americans love their omnibus bills but everyone else just passes them all on the last day of the session. Or has the two bills sitting hostage, one in each chamber (when the chambers aren’t controlled by the same party) while a compromise is formed. Etc. No real difference in transparency or outcome or anything else. Just that in the US there are really quite a lot of people involved and a lot of interest groups in what amounts to a very large democracy. It is always clunky to have that many people represented.

You can still give a name to a sub-bill and talk about it individually. I don’t really see a problem with it except for the offices that have to deal with it.

Also, seeing as you cannot stop them from agreeing to vote a certain way in private, the omnibus bill is something of a transparency measure itself, in that at least we know in an omnibus bill which things were on the trading table and agreed upon at the same time. When there isn’t one, all you can lob is kinda evidence-scarce accusations that your party gave up something you care about and they have some plausible deniability.

[ThunderSizzle]

> Americans love their omnibus bills

DC Politicians love Omnibus bills. Seems weird to say it a way that implies most voters support the omnibus bill concept.

[cormacrelf]

AFAICT regular people don’t care at all. Even the ones into politics. It’s a non-issue.