Verbal Camouflage

Aren't you amazed that we, as a country, have continued to allow our lawmakers to engage in a horribly manipulative practice while they supposedly work at making law and administering the country's budgets. A lot of you are asking yourselves just exactly which of the many shady practices found on Capitol Hill might be the focus of this piece. Might it be lobbying?

No, lobbying is a much more blatant abuse than the one I am thinking about. Franking? That is also very open greed and not as clandestine as the practice that currently concerns me. No, probably the worst practice we allow our lawmakers to engage in is the practice of attaching riders to bills that have nothing to do with the purpose of the bill to which they are attached. This practice is responsible for more pork than all the slaughterhouses in this country combined. Pork is not the worst of it!

There are lawmakers who use the rider as a political weapon. Suppose you are a member of Congress and your constituents back home really want you to get a law passed making it illegal for school bus drivers to use cell phones while the bus is under way. This seems like a good idea, so you draft a bill and you get some support and you get your turn to speak and you present your bill. Now the problems begin. The bill must go through committees. This is where the riders start to show up.

Some other members of Congress see every bill as a vehicle that may get their pet projects approved, so they start attaching riders to your bill. This is especially pronounced if the original bill represents a good idea or at least something that has a good chance of being voted through because nobody would want to be seen voting against it. This last concept is what makes the rider such an effective political weapon.

Suppose there is a situation in which you would want to embarrass your political opponents. You know, a situation like it's a day that ends in Y. Perhaps you might look at a bill such as the one I proposed above and you think up a rider that you know is so odious to the opponent's party that they will all vote against it, even at the cost of losing the original bill. Once the votes are recorded, you can smugly point across the aisle and claim that the other party wants school children to ride in buses driven by people madly text messaging away. This is called the Two-Party System. It is also the reason that so little gets accomplished in the chambers of our government.

The problem that should be glaringly apparent to those of us who vote these people into Congress is this; this system can only be used in this way by someone who doesn't care at all if sound legislation gets passed, as long as they get their way!

What can we do about this problem? Would a line-item veto do the job? I don't think so. There are two big problems with the line-item veto. The most obvious one, with all due respect to our current Commander-in-Chief, is that he, as well as those who came before and those who will follow him, are creatures of their parties. By the time they achieve our nation's highest post, the in-fighting is completely inculcated and the responses are so automatic as to be nearly involuntary, like a knee jerk reflex.

The other problem is that the line-item veto leaves all the responsibility on the President. The Checks and Balances system is supposed to leave the responsibility on the President to stop bad laws with the veto. It was not set up for the President to spend inordinate time cleaning up sloppy laws. Giving the President a line-item veto would be like saying that a bunch of boat builders should feel free to deliver boats with barnacles all over their hulls, which the CEO of the boat company is then expected to scrape away. Obviously no business would ever seek to operate in such a way, so why expect it of our government?

Shouldn't we expect our lawmakers to start crafting quality laws without all the barnacles, er, riders, on them? Maybe the problem is that they have to work so hard. With only about 200 working days per year, at least ten of which are usually taken up by voting themselves a raise, how can they possibly give good hearings to all the bills that are proposed every year? The answer is, they can't!

Maybe the answer is in two laws. Only two laws are needed to put the whole mess right. I know there are lots of ideas for laws. A law to bring back the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Project Administration has gotten a lot of discussion in circles I have been part of. There would be a lot fewer homeless people on the streets and the government would be getting some worth for its money. A lot of the people currently on food stamps and SSI could be put to work. Some folks in Minneapolis might like a new bridge.

No, the two laws necessary to fix Congress would have to do with the lawmaking process. First, we need an end to riders. Riders have never accomplished anything but injecting pork into our budget and unnecessary legislation adding to our already over-regulated society. We have laws for all kinds of garbage that the Framers would never have begun to try to regulate. That brings us to law number two for keeping the lawmaking process under control. We need a law that limits the number of laws each member of Congress can propose per year. This would do a number of good things.

First, bills would get more discussion, both in the chamber and in committee, before coming up for a vote. Additionally, there would be less need for riders because all the members would get an equal chance to propose bills. Of course one bill would need to be added to the quiver of the Speaker of the House, this being the budget for the following year. That might just about do it. A lot of people will say that this is an idealistic, naive solution. History says that there were leaders of many other countries who said the same kinds of things about the founding of the United States and the leaders who brought it about. Maybe these are the kinds of ideas we need more of today.