Josh Marshall and others have reported on something that someone tried to slip into an appropriations bill while no one was looking:
“At the last minute, Republican leaders tried to slip in a provision that would give certain committee chairman and their staffers unlimited access to any American’s tax return, with none of the standard privacy protections applying.
You heard that right.
They could pull anyone’s tax return, read it over and do whatever they wanted with the information. Those who would have this power would be the chairs and ranking members of the senate and house appropriations committees and subcommittees and “their designees.”
The key is that the privacy rights provisions, and criminal and civil penalties that go with them, don’t apply for the appropriations committees.
At the last minute, Senate Democrats caught the language (keep in mind these omnibus bills can be like phone books), protested and the Republicans beat a hasty retreat.”
This particular provision seems to have been blocked. But the general problem remains: this bill was completed on Friday night, the House voted on it on Saturday, and the Senate would have voted on it either yesterday or today had a Senate staffer not caught this particular provision. In other words, Congressional representatives had between nine and thirty-six hours to read a bill that is over 1,000 pages long and contains nine appropriations bills rolled into one emergency spending measure. As CNN put it, “The bill and explanatory report … were about 14 inches tall, leaving many lawmakers baffled about its precise contents.” I’ll say: I read very fast, but the idea of slogging through fourteen inches of anything, let alone appropriations bills, in a day or so is absolutely unimaginable to me.
This is not a new problem: many bills are substantially rewritten either in the Rules Committee or on conference, and then reported out to the Congress with very little time before a vote. “Under the House rules, 48 hours are supposed to elapse before floor action. But in 2003, the leadership, 57 percent of the time, wrote rules declaring bills to be “emergency” measures, allowing then to be considered with as little as 30 minutes notice. On several measures, members literally did not know what they were voting for.” (cite.) This, of course, undermines our democracy: our elected leaders need to have an opportunity to read bills before they vote them into law.
I have, therefore, a proposal. We need to urge our elected representatives to propose and/or support changes to the rules governing the House and Senate that would require a reasonable period of time to elapse between a bill being made available to the House or Senate as a whole and its being voted on. A minimum of three days or one day per one hundred pages of legislation (including the bill and any supporting documents), whichever is greater, seems reasonable to me, but someone else might have a better idea. Moreover, this rule needs to be made harder to set aside: as noted above, there is already a requirement to allow two days to elapse before voting on a bill, but it does not apply to “emergency” bills, and these days the majority of bills are declared by the House leadership to be “emergency” bills. So I propose that this rule could be waived only if the Speaker of the House or the President of the Senate publicly declares before the House or Senate that some state of affairs constitutes an emergency and explains why this emergency justifies waiving the rule for a given bill. (Declaring it before the House or Senate would ensure that it was televised by CSPAN, which might be a deterrent to abuse.)
Does anyone else think that this is a good idea? If so, how do you think we might go about getting it proposed?
Sounds good to me, but all the procedural rules in the world won’t force good governance out of corrupt politicos not being watched by a skeptical press and public.
I think it’s an excellent idea, but will still end up getting ignored.
Lately I’ve been admiring the work of paralegal Pamela Jones and her network of contacts at Groklaw, covering lawsuits of interest to the open-source community. They manage to get long complex transcribed in very short whiles, thanks to an efficient division of labor. I’m wondering if someone could do the same sort of thing for important legislation: get it quickly rendered into a form that makes it easy to search through with electronic tools and human eyes alike.
This issue is not limited to the tax return provision – Republicans also snuck an anti-abortion clause into the spending bill.
The solution is simple. The Democrats should insist, from here on out, that bills be read in their entirety before being voted on. That is their right. That right has customarily been waived as both parties have trusted the integrity of the other.
In this case, that trust was misplaced. Want to pass your 1600 page spending bull? Fine. Read it, and then we’ll decide.
If so, how do you think we might go about getting it proposed?
Wait until 2010.
I think it’s a terrific idea. At least as good as whichever Congressman’s (Ron Paul, maybe?) perennial bill that requires the Congress, when passing any new law, to refer to the Section in Article II of the Constitution, or to the Amendment, which empowers them to pass that law. That one never even makes it out of committee. Neither would this one.
The solution is simple. The Democrats should insist, from here on out, that bills be read in their entirety before being voted on. That is their right
Is that true? If so, then I agree — that’s a perfect response. But where does that right derive from?
I’ve long supported the idea that legislators should have to pass a brief test on any legislation they vote on, to prove they’ve actually read it. I always thought that small-government conservatives should support me on this, since it would have to significantly reduce the amount of legislation actually passed.
On a slightly more realistic note, I certainly support hilzoy’s proposed rules.
Bring back the line-item veto!
If that fails, bring on the line-item Vito. He’ll lean on ’em a bit.
Sorry to throw a damper on these well-intentioned thoughts and proposals but this is why Congressmen have staffs.
Certainly Congressmen should know what’s in (or not in) legislation but do they need to have read every line in it? No.
Think about it; do CEOs read every policy, every report, every piece of documentation his or her company puts out? I can tell you Admirals an Generals don’t; at best they get the Cliff’s Notes version: a white paper with some Powerpoint eyecharts–if they’re lucky.
Congressional staffs are where the policy wonks are; most Congressmen have only a dim understanding of policy.
Jadegold,
OK, but shouldn’t the staffs have adequate time to review the bill? The current approach is a recipe for disaster.
Actually, the solution is a bit simpler. The vast bulk of these last minute rush bills have been around for awhile. You don’t need to reread that stuff, you (congressman or staff of same) did that three months ago. The only reason you need to do that is to spot if anybody’s slipped in any changes. Most of the time the answer is no for any particular paragraph but you have to do it because you have no way of highlighting what’s changed and what’s not.
Comparing two texts and spitting out only the different parts is a problem that is well known in computer code and has been solved for many years. Apply that technology along with versioning and you can take any legislative text, have the computer spit out the 75 paragraphs that have not been reviewed by you or a member of your staff, you read it in a few hours and have time to actually think it over before voting.
Since the hard work is done by the machine, the practice of hiding legislative changes in huge bills becomes impractical. All that need be done is for the minority (who can’t do it) to object to dispensing the third reading of the bill until the collective minority staff has the 10 minutes needed to sort out whether the bill is what the minority thinks it is or it’s been quietly altered.
Since this measure would empower good government and citizens groups, it actually has a shot at being passed.
OK, but shouldn’t the staffs have adequate time to review the bill?
Absolutely.
The abuse occurs when a Congressman or -men opts to attach something–at the last moment– to a piece of legislation that has pretty much been finalized.
The solution for this is fairly easy.
I agree that it’s easy. I also think that it’s an obviously desirable and bipartisan change. Ideally, someone should lobby their legislator to get it introduced, and that someone should be someone who, unlike me, has a Republican representative. (More likely to work.)
That being said, if the Republicans won’t do it, it also seems to me to be a good issue for Democrats to press, even if it won’t get passed. Since I generally prefer actual progress to political posturing, I will hold off on trying to get my Rep. to introduce it for a few weeks in the hope that, as I said, someone whose Rep. is Republican will try; but after that, I will try myself. (I am serious about this: the system of considering bills in the House is broken, and any little bit of fixing it is, it seems to me, a good idea. Plus, something we can all agree on across our various partisan divides 🙂 )
TM — ‘taint that easy. Go over to Thomas and look at some actual bills to see why. Key word — lawyers.
The problem with this bit of corruption is the conference procedure. For a bill to become law, *the identical* bill has to be passed in both the House and the Senate. Normally, House and Senate versions are quite different. The Conference Committee is supposed to just iron out the differences, but it seems to be really easy to just slip in something completely unrelated. Sen John McCain tracks this kind of pork.
What we need is a law/procedure/ruling/whatever that a provision inserted in conference that’s not in either the House or Senate bill makes the whole bill null and void. Not gonna happen — our elected rulers want a method of sneaking stuff past the radar.
I think this is a good idea, but I think a huge part of the problem is the practice of attaching unrelated riders to bills. I don’t know how to effectively combat it (I can see stupid fighting about ‘related’ if we tried to make a rule) but it seems obvious to me that abortion related or death-penalty related bills don’t belong with defence bills for instance (to name an instance of crazy ridering from each side of the aisle that I vaguely remember from some time ago.)
Well, the problem is that most of these changes are already “rules” but the House simply waives the rules. It used to be a big deal when the conference committee inserted something that was in neither the house bill nor the senate bill, but now it seems like it’s just accepted.
Likewise, it used to be a big deal when substantive law was passed on appropriations bills (which are supposed to fund the government but not change agencies’ statutory requirements) but again it seems as though under the Republicans that has become SOP.
Fundamentally I believe House Republicans have no respect for process– their goal is simply to achieve as much of their agenda as possible however possible– and I think it would be very hard to make the House process a national issue.
The solution for this is fairly easy.
Yeah, Haven’t they heard of the “Track Changes” function in Word?
I don’t mean to derail this discussion, as Hilzoy’s procedural reform looks good, and I’d like to see something addressing Sebastian’s conference issue as well. But there is a larger, slightly philosophical issue at play here that concerns me.
People have mentioned that Congresspersons have staffs to read these bills. The citizens of the United States do not. Yet, when Congress makes law, we are obligated to comply with that law. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, yet, ignorance of the law is a given.
I seem to recall that the ancient Greeks had addressed this particular issue by setting aside several large stones in the public assembly into which was carved all law which bound their citizens. If you filled up the all the stones and you wanted to pass another law, you had to pick one to take down.
What I wouldn’t give for that sort of reform…
I agree that the practice of tacking on unrelated provisions to bills is a problem, but also that trying to parse ‘related’ in practice would be difficult. It’s also true that something like this is a rule; but that’s why my proposal has two parts: first, slightly lengthening the normal time that must elapse before voting on a bill, and second, requiring the head of the relevant chamber to publicly explain why the rules need to be waived. The idea there is to harness the potential for shame: since CSPAN would record it, someone’s political opponents could use video of the speaker proclaiming the need for a bill renaming some bridge too be an emergency, or explaining why the House has yet to pass any of its appropriations bills before the last minute, or whatever.
I think the shaming issue could be an excellent motivator to curb some of the more obnoxious abuses.
I think the shaming issue could be an excellent motivator to curb some of the more obnoxious abuses.
Thirded? Fourthed? Nthed? Whatever’s appropriate, really.