How to fix congress?

The House has passed a bill that would extend the payroll tax cut another year. Unfortunately, it would also force the State Dept to speed its decision on the Keystone pipeline, which is a proposed pipe for Canada’s tar sand production. The pipeline has become a contentious issue for the White House, with the predictable, well worn argument between environmental groups and industry. The pipeline provision means this bill is DOA in the Senate.

But wait? What does an oil pipe have to do with payroll taxes? If you answered “nothing”, you win the prize! They have nothing to do with one another. But this tactic of putting irrelevant amendments onto bills (they’re called riders)  is nothing new for Congress, and a big part of why it’s become difficult to accomplish, er, anything at all. By adding a politically toxic provision to a bill, a congress critter can effectively kill that bill by ensuring that no other congress critters can vote for it, because then they would be voting for the toxic amendment as well.

So here’s a modest proposal. Stop doing that! Just stop. If Congress wants to consider a bill on some issue, it should do so on the merits of that particular issue, and not on whether or not the bill will also mandate the kicking of puppies (or some other nonsense). What would this accomplish? Well, Congress could do actual things.  Congress critters spend a lot of their time and energy working on these riders. They are used as weapons to force opponents into damaging positions and to scuttle otherwise uncontroversial bills. Instead of writing politically loaded bills to be used as a cudgel against whoever, congress could put all that energy into actually writing real legislation designed to address some issue of national importance. Now of course this would not prevent disagreement, nor should it! But it would lead to better (read: actual) legislation, rather than partisan detritus. And hey, maybe it would even help congress with its public approval. Currently, the BP oil spill, Paris Hilton, and communism are all more popular than the US Congress. That’s a little embarrassing for them, I would think.

So it seems like we could accomplish something by not loading bills with crazy riders. But how would that work? How do we classify what is or is not relevant to a bill? If we just ask for a justification of relevance, then it will be easy to circumvent the rule. For example, The Keystone XL pipeline is forecast by some industry groups to create almost a quarter million jobs (that number is the subject of much dispute, but bear with me).  If the payroll tax cut works out to $1,000 per person, then the pipeline changes the tax cut’s impact on the federal budget to the tune of 250 million dollars. So the pipeline is related to the payroll tax! Of course any government function involves money in some way, so the basic formula to prove anything is relevant to anything else is “both proposals require taxes/spending cuts/etc, and thus are related”.

Unfortunately, I don’t see any workable/enforceable rules or regulatory structure that could prevent this.

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