If were Dictator for a Day…
One of my first acts would be to institute a policy (or sign into law) a bill that any bill introduced or any law passed by any legislative body in the country must be limited to one subject AND that the title of the bill be an easy-to-understand and accurate description of that law. In other words, you couldn’t pass a law requiring everyone to pay an additional 25% in income tax while calling it The Great American Grandmother Protection Act. The law has nothing to do with protecting grandmothers. Nor could you pass a law that actually does protect grandmothers, call it The Great American Grandmother Protection Act and bury deep within it language imposing an annual surtax on any harmonica purchased in the key of C. Or anything else that does not have to do with protecting grandmothers. (Even though most of the grandmothers I’ve known are pretty good at protecting themselves, thank you.)
Accuracy and Transparency
Transparency in government is critical if we’re to be a nation governed by the people. But it’s often difficult to tell what’s in a bill, either by its title or its text.
Why is that?
Simple. There’s no law requiring accuracy in law labeling, and lawmakers don’t always want you to know what they’re up to. That’s because the laws they write are often written for special interest groups and may or may not do what voters actually want or have been promised. And there’s no law requiring only one subject be covered when writing a single bill. Currently, one bill can cover a multitude of topics, so it’s easy to hide stuff.
Admittedly, whether a bill is accurately labeled is often a matter of who is reading the label, regardless of the number of topics it may cover.
Take the current Inflation Reduction Act. Democrats want everyone to think it will reduce inflation. Republicans are calling it The Green New Deal in Disguise. Pundits are coming up with other names for it. New York Times Columnist Bret Stephens said "It probably would have been better called the West Virginia Special Perks Act, after all the goodies Joe Manchin stuffed into it for his home state, or the Elon Musk Additional Enrichment Act, given all the tax rebates for buying electric vehicles."
This is nothing new.
Inside the Beltway
Recently, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a billed called the Respect for Marriage Act. The bill provides statutory authority for same sex and interracial marriages by changing federal laws defining the term marriageas between a man and a woman and the word spouse as a person of the opposite sex. Essentially, the bill recognizes any marriage valid under any state law.
Liberals believe the law is correctly labeled. Conservatives opine it imposes an unbiblical view of marriage and sexuality on the entire country.
Similar battles were fought over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, also called Obamacare. Democrats named the bill. Republicans claimed it neither protected patients nor made health care more affordable.
Down on the Farm
Agriculture interests are infamous for receiving some of the biggest subsidies in the country, to the tune of billions of dollars. But often, the bills are camouflaged to slip past public criticism. The 1996 farm subsidy bill was titled the Federal Agriculture Improvement Act of 1996. Informally, it was called the Freedom to Farm Act. Hard to argue with words like “Improvement” and “Freedom,” right? Critics claimed the bill would pay out billions of dollars to wealthy farmers and expand food stamps to individuals who earned enough to pay for their own food. The bill also included promises to eliminate farm subsidies, which critics claimed never happened.
A bill is currently in the 117th Congress (2021-2022) called the Farm Subsidy Transparency Act. On the surface, one would think it would be a bill designed to control future farm subsidy bills, to ensure that they are accurately labeled. For instance, if passed, the next session of Congress might have to pass a farm subsidy bill labeled A $250 Billion Taxpayer-Funded Subsidy for Already Wealthy Conglomerate Farms bill. But nope, that’s not the type of transparency this “Transparency” bill is about. This transparency bill is about identifying recipients by name, gender and race. The bill’s description says it requires “collection and disclosure of demographic and other information about recipients of agricultural benefits.” By reading the bill itself, you will learn it mandates the collection and disclosure of name, race and gender, plus acreage, of anyone obtaining federally subsidized agricultural insurance, or subsidized insurance premiums. Hmm.
Guess Many Earmarks are in the Pork Barrel?
There also seems to be no law controlling the number of items in a bill. Hence, one never knows what one will find buried in a bill. The $1.5 trillion (yes, that’s trillion with a t) omnibus spending bill rolled out last March is 2,700 pages in length and contains thousands of special-interest funding provisions injected by members of Congress. Just the list of earmarks is 367 pages, all by itself!
Trying to identify that many individual earmarks in a single bill as it passes through Congress is like trying to identify individual crew members on an aircraft carrier as it passes by. Don’t think it’s done that way for no reason.
There might be hope. There might be help. But don’t count on it.
Another House bill, titled the One Bill, One Subject Transparency Act has been introduced, just this session. It requires “each bill or joint resolution to include no more than one subject to be clearly and descriptively expressed in the measure’s title.” Regardless of the bill’s merit, it’s future will probably be determined by its authorship. The bill is H.R. 46 and was introduced by Republican Andy Biggs of Arizona in an overwhelmingly Democrat-controlled House. So far, it has gone nowhere.
Stay tuned.