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.
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.
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.