This is an issue that I've been thinking on for several years. One thing that I've considered as a solution to this problem is a hard word limit on new bills that go through Congress (a 5000 word limit would be an example of such a length). Ideally, the length would be short enough such that the average regular task in Congress could realistically be written as a single bill, but even if this was not the case, a proposed bill that needed more length could instead be introduced as two or even three bills that are collectively equivalent.
The previous statement creates the appearance that such a law would have no effect, but there are several reasons why this would be beneficial:
- It creates a disincentive for large bills. A 1,000,000 word bill under this system would have to be passed as 200 separate bills. This in turn would require 200 bill proposals, 200 separate debate sessions, and 200 voting sessions. This would take a lot of time, and this is time that the members of Congress are not spending on other bills or on their personal lives. This artificial, time based throttling discourages excessively long bills from being passed, but it has progressively lesser effects on shorter bills.
- It allows sufficient time for a realistic review of new bills, both from the perspective of the members of Congress and from the President's perspective. When the bills that are being discussed are 5000 words or less, it is reasonable to expect that the members of Congress read the bill in its entirety before voting on it (this might take somewhere between 1/2 hour and 2 hours, depending on reading speed). Though riders are still possible, they will therefore be more transparent to members of Congress (even if they are obfuscated, it will be apparent that the proposed bill contains obfuscated text). Since there is an inherent delay in proposing and voting on a bill, even in the worst case scenario, Congress would have difficulties passing bills fast enough for the President to not have enough time to review each bill in its entirety. Congress would have to pass multiple bills consecutively without reading any of them for days on end for this to be a possible issue, and even then, the President might start considering vetoing all incoming bills until Congress slowed down. Therefore, the points of limited time and absurdly long bills is no longer a form of plausible deniability for passing bills with riders in them.
- It makes it such that riders are proportionally larger in the bills they are a part of. Consider a 1,000,000 word bill with a 500 word rider in it. That rider is .005% of the entire bill. From a Congressman's perspective, the bill could be argued as worth passing since it is 99.995% "good". However, if the same 500 word rider had to be put into a 5000 word bill, it would comprise 10% of that bill, and there would only be 4500 words in the bill (90%) that were not a part of the rider. There would be a greater chance of the Congressman seeing the bill as worth rejecting on the basis of a contained rider.
Are there any thoughts on this? Any detriments or additional benefits that I have not yet thought of?
Another possible solution that I've considered for this problem is the creation of another medium for interstate level finances to benefit states, perhaps in a way that might not need the federal government to serve this role. The very existence of pork (I consider this to consist of riders that fund financial endeavors with primary benefit that is not at the federal level) suggests that there is a demand for funding large state projects with finances that individual states cannot realistically procure, and that federal bills are presently the most readily available way to meed this demand. I considered the possibility of an interstate borrowing system as a possible implementation of such a solution, but my thoughts on this subject (feasibility, benefits, detriments, etc.) are less refined. Does this sound interesting to anybody else?
I suppose occasionally riders do some good.
Is there a specific example that you were thinking of when you said that? Also, did you mean to say that some laws that are passed as riders are good on their own accord, or that the practice of passing laws as riders is occasionally beneficial, even if the laws themselves are not necessarily so?
