Glenn Harlan Reynolds

We’ve seen it over and over: Congress passes huge bills, like Obamacare or the recent omnibus spending bill, that contain hundreds of provisions, and occupy thousands of pages — or tens of thousands if you include the ensuing pages of regulations. These bills are so long that literally no one has read the whole thing. They’re not so much bills, really, as Christmas trees on which lobbyists and legislators hang their goodies.

A bill that’s so long that nobody can read it is, naturally, pretty likely to escape scrutiny. With thousands of pages and hundreds or thousands of provisions in the bill, what’s the chance that any particular provision will be noticed or criticized?

And even if a few provisions are criticized, when they’re tied to a bill that rewards literally hundreds of constituencies, there’s not much chance they’ll be shot down. Legislators, and special interests, have a vested interest in sticking together and being sure that the whole bill passes. Individually, most of these lousy provisions wouldn’t pass, but when banded together for mutual protection they can.

The result is something that doesn’t look much like the legislative process as we teach it in school. There aren’t hearings on each provision, there isn’t a lot of public debate, and there’s essentially no back-and-forth. Often, most of the provisions are written by lobbyists and inserted by tame members of Congress. The public isn’t really represented at all. That’s not an accident — it’s by design.

Enter Congresswoman Mia Love, a Republican from Utah. She wants to introduce a “single subject rule” to federal legislation. Says Love, as quoted by the Deseret News: "Members of both parties have made a habit of passing complex, thousand-page bills without hearings, amendments or debate. ... That process and the collusion that goes with it are why we are $18 trillion in debt and why the American people have lost trust in elected officials."

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Her bill, H.R. 4335, would do the following according to Love's congressional website:

Require that each bill enacted by Congress be limited to only one subject;

End the practice of attaching controversial legislation to unrelated, must-pass bills;

Require the subject of a bill to be clearly state in its title;

Make void in appropriations bills, general legislation that does not pertain to the underlying (appropriations) bill;

Make the legislative process more transparent to the public

Importantly, the bill also provides for judicial review, allowing a court to strike legislation that doesn’t comply. And, in keeping with Love’s philosophy, the bill is just over three pages long.

This isn’t exactly a new idea. Many states, such as Mia Love’s Utah, or my own state of Tennessee, have provisions in their state constitutions that limit legislation to a single subject. Some also provide for judicial review. And Love isn’t the first to propose such a rule: In fact, Brannon Denning and Brooks Smith proposed a constitutional amendment, the “Truth In Legislation Amendment,” in a law review article over a decade ago. (Coincidentally, their piece was published in the Utah Law Review.)

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Whether enacted legislatively, or by constitutional amendment, a rule that a bill must have a single subject and a descriptive title would go a long way toward limiting cronyism and corruption. Personally, I would prefer a constitutional amendment that, like Tennessee’s provision, would allow anyone to sue and have a bill struck down if it did things not included in its caption. A statute like Love’s is second-best, and given our political class’s willingness to skirt the rules, probably a poor second-best, though still worth trying.

The deeper problem is that neither Congress, nor the voters, seems sufficiently attached to clean government to make it work. In the old days of what is now nostalgically referred to as “regular order,” one set of congressional committees had to authorize spending, while another had to appropriate funds. Spending bills — and general legislation — advanced after subcommittee and committee hearings in which issues were discussed publicly, followed, sometimes at least, by amendments. This gradually broke down with the growth of gigantic omnibus bills, and once politicians realized they could get away with it, the kitchen-sink approach to legislation became the norm.

As Rep. Love notes, this is how we wound up with an enormous debt and with a Congress that few Americans respect. The old days were hardly a paradise of clean government, but they look like that now, by comparison with what we’ve got. Her bill is, at least, a step in the right direction. Will it pass? We can hope.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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