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Comment by monooso | Hacker News Reader

Not only that, the same bill includes a provision which allows "...eight Republican senators to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for alleged privacy violations stemming from the Biden administration's investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot." [1].

This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill makes no sense to me.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/deal-end-us-shutdow...

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> This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill makes no sense to me.

"Legislation" is the "bill," which is what makes this problematic. At a high level, the only thing that relates the first page of a bill to the 10th page of the same bill is the fact that they are both included in the same document. This is definitional stuff.

Congress could choose to appropriate funds for each department in a separate bill. One could then easily take the POV that it's swampy to tack on the education funding legislation to the defense appropriations bill.

Always amazes me that we allow multiple bills to be packaged together. Needs to be one bill = 1 vote. Not hundreds/thousands of pages of bills no one will read all rushed through because funding.

Isn't it usually one bill, but an omnibus bill? My understanding is that the actual guard rail that the US congress has discarded is requiring that the contents of the bill be limited to the purview described by the bill's title.

I guess technically yeah but they're usually bills that wouldn't have any chance of being law on their own. "I'll vote for it if you include this" kinda deals.

To do so you need an effective bureaucracy to which the legislature can delegate authority, otherwise there are too many details to be passed in bills. But the revanchist Roberts court has said that bureaucratic powers do not exist, the executive can only do things that are expressly enumerated by Congress and Congress can delegate nothing.

>To do so you need an effective bureaucracy to which the legislature can delegate authority, otherwise there are too many details to be passed in bills. But the revanchist Roberts court has said that bureaucratic powers do not exist,

And your way would be better? All laws defined and redefined by bureaucracies in committees behind closed doors?

That isn't how federal rules have historically been made, so I neither disagree nor agree with your misleading statement.

Federal rules are created collaboratively between executive agencies and the subject matter experts relevant to the regulation, then published in the Federal Register for public review and comments, then after feedback has been gathered, considered, and incorporated the final rules are promulgated. This process was created by Congress.

That was during the Biden Administration. The Roberts Court now says the Executive can do anything. Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB, Seila Law, the end of Chevron deference, and of course, immunity. Anything.

I don’t like massive omnibus bills, but at the same time it provides I suppose a “transaction commit” mechanism for lawmakers to group unrelated elements.

You support my bill, I support yours, we both win. In the case is one-bill, one-entry requirements it allows for bad faith negotiations and trickery.

Maybe there is some middle ground where we cap the number of unrelated entries on a bill to allow transactions but not the classic “we don’t have time to read” shenanigans.

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