Thief's Den

One Subject To Rule Them All

SDB writes, in response to a question from Ireland as to why Congressional bills are loaded with riders:

That's something which happens in both chambers. It isn't unique to the Senate. It happens all the time, on nearly every major bill. I guess the only answer to that question, in general, is the famous one: "Men who love sausage or the law should not watch either one being made."

I would say that the answer is probably that our tradition is that giving the Speaker that power to decide what is or is not relevant is dangerous, since he might use that power to the advantage of his own party. Not giving the Speaker of the House (or the President pro-tem of the Senate) that power means you get sausage bills, but the alternative is concentrating too much unchecked power in one place. We Americans generally believe that concentrated and unchecked power will always be abused, eventually, by someone. Sausage bills are a lesser evil.

As a lover of constitutional law (though not a lawyer), I'd just like to point out that certain state governments have tackled the same problem in an entirely different way, and with some effect: through the use of "one-subject" rules.


Red=States with Constitutionally-Mandated One-Subject Rules

One-subject rules are pretty much self-explanatory: No bill enacted by a legislature can deal with more than one subject, with the subject specified in the bill's title. (For example, a bill about establishing a tax on liquor would be acceptable, whereas a bill about establishing taxes on liquor AND building a new state highway wouldn't. It's not a hard and fast rule, and it requires a bit of creative interpretation (e.g. a bill stating that the new state highway will be paid for with money earned from liquor taxes would probably be OK).Texas' rule, as far as I can tell, is pretty typical - "No bill, (except general appropriation bills, which may embrace the various subjects and accounts, for and on account of which moneys are appropriated) shall contain more than one subject." The stated purpose of this rule is that "a legislative proposal should stand on its own merits and not be combined with unrelated proposals to generate broader support." If a bill violates the one-subject rule, it can be challenged by legislators, and is also considered grounds for state courts to strike down bills encompassing more than one subject. The best-known case of the latter was in 1995, when the Ohio Supreme Court threw out the state's recently-enacted voucher program on the grounds that it violated that state's one-subject rule. (In this case, the program was attached to the state's annual appropriations bill, most likely because the state was under a court order to fix Cleveland's underperfoming schools ASAP.) The trick, as with any rule designed to restrain a mischevous government, is that the rule must be enforced by someone.

I'm guessing that a Federal one-subject rule would not be a bad thing at all, if it would put a dent in the problem of Congress passing those monstrous "omnibus bills" that spend billions of taxpayer (read: OUR) money while no one even has time to read them before they pass...

Posted by Thief at July 7, 2004 06:58 PM