Jan. 25, 2004 - 19:41 MST

THE WONDERING JEW

Omnibus

My opinions about things.

Headed, "Policymaking by stealth"

It starts in an unexpected direction, at least to me it does.

"There's been a lot of moaning about all the pork-barrel spending in the $328 billion federal budget bill that finally passed Thursday. While much of the criticism is justified, there's also a lot of hypocrisy about pork. We all have a little grease on our chins. After all, its pork if another state gets the money, but its community development if our state gets lucky."

Less attention has been paid to the more serious problem of important policy provisions in the bill that should have received individual deliberation and votes.

"Tucked into what should have been just a spending bill also were sections that:"

"Change the rules that govern worker's eligibility for overtime."

"Allow media companies to own more local TV stations than previous policy permitted."

"Delay for two years rules that would require food-product labels to identify the country of origin."

"Individual measures loaded with lots of seemingly unrelated subjects are called "Omnibus" bills."

"There are two motivations behind such massive bills, one probably legitimate, one much less so."

"The legitimate motivations is efficiency. Its probably unrealistic to think that Congress has the time to consider and vote on individual spending items, or even on separate spending bills for individual federal agencies."

What's much less legitimate is the practice of tucking important policy issues into spending bills as a way of circumventing the will of the majority.

"That's what happened with overtime and media ownership, which faced significant congressional opposition, even among Republicans."

"By including those in a spending bill that had to pass lest government operations be disrupted, the administration and its leadership allies in effect forced the congressional rank and file to vote for things it didn't want."

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The media has been talking about the push by the administration to get the pension restrictions and also the TV ownership bit enacted for a long time. I guess I should have expected a dirty move like what just happened. I wonder, would a filibuster have stopped this ? You know, "Boys that ain't fair, go back and eliminate the things that should be voted on individially !" "Or we'll shut the government down." Didn't something like that happen some time ago ?

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The last paragraph of the article, "In this case, Congress needs to do better and consider the example of the Colorado legislature and of other states that have much tighter rules about the content of bills. Stealth policy making doesn't serve the public well."

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Yep, I agree on that. One idea that occurs to me is that there should be line item veto on items not pertaining to spending on measures like this, thereby allowing a vote on each measure turned down by line item vote. Wouldn't that cork their bottle. What will be their next move now ? I wonder.

Right now all I can say is, "Help, I have been run over by an Omnibus . . . . . . . . . .

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