Constitutional Amendment Needed

We have to stop this practice of stuffing unrelated items into appropriations bills. This epidemic has been poisoning the legislative branch for years, and it's gotten completely out of hand. Witness this week, where the House has run amok, forcing its members to vote on key bills without knowing what's in them:

The House Republican Leadership has announced its intention to have the House vote today on conference reports on a budget-cut “reconciliation” bill (S. 1932) and the defense appropriation bill (H.R. 2863) under a procedure known as “martial law.”  The Leadership’s proposal to invoke martial law has already been debated on the House floor and will be voted on later today.

* Just before midnight on Sunday, December 18, the House adopted the “martial law rule” that allowed the leadership to bring up the conference report on the reconciliation bill shortly after the conference report was finalized, without waiting until the next legislative day as required by House rules.

* At 1:12 a.m. on Monday, December 19, the 774 page conference report on the reconciliation spending cut bill was filed in the House.

* At 5:43 a.m. Monday morning, after less than 40 minutes of debate on the measure, the House began the final vote on the reconciliation spending cut bill.

Under this procedure, longstanding House rules that require at least one day between the unveiling of significant legislation and the House floor vote on that legislation are swept away.  Instead, under “martial law,” the Leadership can file legislation with hundreds of pages of fine print and move immediately to debate and votes on it, before Members of Congress, the media, or the public have an opportunity to understand fully what provisions have been altered or inserted in the legislation behind closed doors.  This is the procedure the Leadership hopes to use today to muscle through these bills.

Not to be outdone, the Senate, mainly due to the efforts of Ted Stevens of Alaska, has inserted an ANWR drilling measure into a "must-pass" defense appropriations bill. This is simply outrageous. If you can't get your legislation passed through normal channels, sticking it into politically popular bills at the last minute to force it through it the height of cowardice. The Republicans have been in charge of the House (and for the most part, the Senate) for ten years, so it's pretty hard to blame the Dems for this one.

And not only are they inserting these programs into unrelated bills, they're overturning parliamentary procedure to get them passed:

Senate Republicans prepared a targeted version of the so-called “nuclear option” yesterday as they tried to ensure adoption of a defense-spending conference report that includes a controversial provision opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil and gas drilling.

The tactic promises to make the consensus-based Senate temporarily resemble the majority-dominated House.

The ANWR provision leaves the measure open to a point of order because it runs afoul of Senate Rule 28, which requires that conference reports contain only provisions that were included in either the House- or Senate-passed versions of the bill.

The president of the Senate, who rules on parliamentary questions, would be expected to uphold the point of order. But Republican leaders plan to appeal that ruling, allowing 51 senators — rather than the 60-vote majority typically needed to waive points of order — to allow the ANWR provision to stand.

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and the chief proponent of ANWR drilling, included a provision to ensure that the precedent set by the move would not become permanent. Under that language, the Senate would revert the precedent that existed at the start of the 109th Congress.

It is possible that Stevens, who is president pro tempore of the Senate, could preside over the proceedings on a point of order, according to Amy Call, spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

This back-door lawmaking demeans our entire system of government. Referring these bills over to a bipartisan or nonpartisan group which decides (under agreed-to rules) what legislation must be passed as part of an appropriations package and what must be stand-alone is absolutely vital. This is an utter perversion of the legislative process, and one senator can make this all go away by forcing the issue and essentially bringing the chamber to a halt until an actual procedure is set into place.