Posted on 03/12/2016 7:02:48 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
How many times have you heard of Senators and Representatives adding riders or amendments to bills to help fund their pet projects back in their states or for a friend? I’ve written about a number of these in the past including:
Don’t you wish there was a way to stop all of this wasteful use of taxpayer dollars? Well, I found a simple way to stop all of it and much much more unnecessary spending.
Recently I posted about the adoption of the Confederate Constitution back in March 1861. In that lengthy post, I compared the Confederate Constitution with that of the US, since they used the US Constitution as their foundation.
While writing that comparison, I discovered one short 23-word paragraph that the Confederates added to their Constitution that I really wish was part of ours.
Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 20 of the Confederate Constitution read:
“(20) Every law, or resolution having the force of law, shall relate to but one subject, and that shall be expressed in the title.”
It restricts every bill before Congress to deal with one subject alone. That means no riders, add-ons or 2,000 page bills that cover hundreds of different items. That would eliminate all of the pet projects that Congressmen and women constantly add on to the end of totally unrelated bills. This would save hundreds of billions and even trillions of taxpayer dollars.
Just imagine what that would have meant to Obamacare. Every aspect of the massive socialist tome would have to have been separated out into individual bills. Each individual bill would then be scrutinized and either passed or rejected. Do you think that parts of Obamacare like the individual mandate, employer mandate, contraception mandate and all of the nearly 20 additional taxes created or raised by the Affordable Care Act would have been passed and signed into law if they were handled individually?
What about the federal appropriations or budget bills? Wouldn’t it make more sense to see one bill for the Defense Department, one bill for the Justice Department and so on? It would make it much harder to sneak in spending for more than what’s really necessary.
I honestly think that if we adopted this paragraph from the Confederate Constitution that it would drastically reduce federal spending and save American taxpayers trillions of dollars in the long run. What say ye?
PING!
I believe all Bills should be stand alone with no riders!!!
Sounds good. Bills also need to specifically state (Art. Sec. Cl.) from whence they claim their authority.
Sounds racist. Bush’s fault.
Not funny.
For example: "State Department Miscellaneous Budget Act" or "2017 Diversified Expense Act."
I like the idea of not having unrelated riders attached to bills, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that anything as simple as that will change government spending habits.
Damn right! 0-care for everybody!
Yep. You'd also see a lot of titles with the word "and" in them. As in: The 2017 Air Force Appropriation and Colorado Stop Signs Act.
Bookmark
#430,000 on a study to find that overweight women don’t get asked out on dates as much as normal weight women.
Me make Bookmark Too!
(Ugh.)
Seriously, this is the kind of thing that needs to be fleshed out into a scholarly monograph.
And I’m just the pseudo-scholarly monographer to do it.
Does LS know his project is being called unnecessary waste of money?
This assumes the US follows a Constitution
This is the law in Washington State.
Ed
The phrase "shall relate to but one subject" would prevent this.
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