I just read in my local paper that 4 separate Montana land bills are being merged and added to the Defense Bill.
I live in Montana so I’m always happy to see any Montana initiatives being discussed in Washington D.C., but why do they have to tie these bills to a gigantic Defense bill? These 4 bills have absolutely nothing to do with defense. Doesn’t it muddle things up to add things that have nothing to do with what the larger bill is about? Perhaps they think there is a better chance of getting it passed if it’s tied to a large bipartisan bill that will likely not be vetoed.
I know this is a fairly common practice, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. Are there really so many bills being considered at the same time that they have to combine them with other bills just to get a vote on them?
So without a line item veto the president is stuck with signing a critical bill no matter how much unrelated stuff is added to it?
Then why even have a defense bill in the first place? Why not just call it the ‘Miscellaneous Bill’ since it includes lots of stuff completely unrelated to defense.
'Cuz a president may feel free to veto a “Miscellaneous Bill”. But label it something really important, and it works.
I was about to start into an entire political rant, but this is GQ. So let’s just say that riders are a damn effective way of sliding smallish unrelated topics into legislation without having to withstand detailed scrutiny or veto risk. As such, since it’s permissible by Congressional procedure, it’s a very strategically wise thing to do if your objective is to slide smallish unrelated topics through the process.
The moral fitness of such tactics is debatable. Just not here.
In this particular case, it has nothing to do with a presidential veto.
The land bills have been held up in Congress for several years, primarily due to the fact that passing minor legislation in the Senate requires all one hundred senators to agree. The reason the defense bill and the lands bill were merged was to get around the objections of a small number of senators who opposed the land measures coming up as stand-alone bills.
So, in the minds of some, the only way the land bills could get passed is to tack them on a much more popular measure, the defense bill. It all has to do with getting things through Congress, rather than avoiding a veto, at least in this case.
Also, according to House Republicans, there are something like 350 bills that have been passed by the House that have not been raised for consideration in the Senate. Many of them die in the Senate because the Democratic leadership doesn’t want to hold a vote on Republican priorities. Others die because most minor bills pass the Senate in a procedure that requires every senator to agree to them. So yes, there is a traffic jam in the Senate for legislation, and it has been that way for an awfully long time… but some may argue that it has gotten worse recently.
The rules of the Senate are highly biased towards allowing debate (or a filibuster, if you wish to call it that). If no senator objects to a bill being passed, a motion known as “unanimous consent” allows matters to be disposed of in seconds.
If unanimous consent cannot be agreed upon, then there must be a motion to proceed to the bill, which can be filibustered. Then there is debate on the bill and amendments, which can be filibustered. Those filibusters can be overcome with cloture motions requiring 60% of senators to approve, but that also means that the Senate can spend roughly a week doing little else that dealing with all of those motions. For minor bills, it is just unrealistic for the Senate to take a week doing basically nothing but debating a lands bill or post office naming bill. So, the only practical alternatives are to get unanimous consent, don’t do the bill at all, or consider them as amendments to other bills.
The House doesn’t have this problem because there are no filibusters in the House. The time for debate on a bill can be strictly controlled by the Speaker’s party, so they can generally determine if there’s going to be 5 minutes or 5 days of debate on a bill before forcing a vote. That simply cannot happen in the Senate.