Are megabills bad?
Bundling together large bills makes sense for politicians — but is it good for representative democracy?
Making bills bigger is a cunning power move for politicians — but bad for representative democracy.
Over recent history, there has been a strong trend in Congress towards passing fewer bills. This is not to say that Congress is doing less; individual bills have gotten much longer, with significant pieces of legislation bundling together more and more things together. Why?
Let’s think about a hypothetical scenario for a moment. If the Speaker of the House insists that any law authorizing a national firearms background check system must also include a provision banning national distribution of asparagus, the Senate and the President cannot simply bypass the House and create a background check system without an asparagus ban.
Larger bills give power to key legislators by letting them bundle unpopular measures (such as banning asparagus) together with more popular measures (such as creating an instant background check system for firearms purchases). Fortunately for everyone, the 1998 Brady Bill didn’t ban asparagus.
The trend towards more megabills is fueled by political leaders seeking to maximize their own power and the power of their political party. It’s well-known that earmarks and log-rolling also lead to waste and support corruption. However, I believe there’s a deeper problem with megabills: They undermine the basic operations of representative democracy.
How do megabills undermine democracy?
While today’s megabills are longer than ever before, the basic underlying problem is not. Legislatures run by political coalitions are naturally prone to log-rolling and pork-barrel waste, bundling together unrelated measures together to get them passed into law.
One reason for Congress’s perennially low approval ratings is that Congress perennially loads down necessary legislation with unrelated measures that range from wasteful to deeply unpopular. This was true when voters rallied behind Grover Cleveland’s anti-corruption message in 1884; it is still true today. However, log-rolling efforts don’t always lead to a bill passing.
If senators or the president decide to put their foot down in front of a bill to stop the waste, it can prevent urgent and necessary legislation from passing - which is just as bad. One recent example of political dysfunction was COVID cash. Leaders in both parties, ranging from Donald Trump to Nancy Pelosi, claimed they supported direct unconditional cash relief to ordinary people.
After one first $1200 payment in April, a majority of Republican politicians and a majority of Democratic politicians agreed that more payments were necessary and appropriate. What they didn’t agree on was everything else. Instead, Republicans and Democrats deadlocked until December, with political leaders holding direct payments hostage to less-popular elements of their own agenda.
The result was that both Democrats and Republicans spent the 2020 election cycle claiming that they wanted to hand out COVID cash, but that the other party was preventing it. This is a problem, because representative democracy relies on representatives being accountable to voters.
With megabills, almost every legislator can claim to support the popular elements of the megabill and oppose the unpopular elements of the megabill, regardless of whether they voted for or against the bill. This makes it harder for voters to hold legislators accountable.
Are there solutions?
State legislatures had the same exact problems with bundling together unrelated acts together in a single bill. Had, past tense. At this point in time, forty-three out of fifty states require that legislative bills treat with a single specific subject. Forty-four give the governor a line-item veto, a power that only one US president has ever had. The laboratories of democracy have completed their experiments and concluded that legislatures cannot be trusted to behave well enough on their own.
In early 1995, with political tension running high, Republican senator Bob Dole introduced a bill to give the line item veto to a Democratic president, Bill Clinton. In 1998, the line-item veto was struck down by the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision, with the court concluding that the power to veto parts of a bill went beyond the scope of the constitutional veto power.
For now, it is up to Congress to regulate its own behavior in determining which agglomerations of acts can be passed together as a single combined bill.