Taking a step to restoring common sense to the legislative process

December 6, 2022

There are problems with the Congressional process of writing legislation. This process should be simple and straight-forward: if a representative or senator has a proposal he or she believes would benefit the country, it should be written up in the appropriate manner and submitted for consideration.

Usually, this would take several pages, but not hundreds of pages, as some bills do. It also would not involve some number of items added to a bill that are not related to the stated purpose of the bill.

These days we find proposed legislation of hundreds and hundreds of pages and many additional items, some or most of which do not relate to the bill’s purpose.

Unrelated items that are included are designed to serve other purposes. They frequently are used to benefit some particular special interest group or a political purpose that the proponent seeks to help by adding items to the bill that have nothing to do with its stated purpose. 

The authors believe these little goodies will slide through because the main purpose of the bill is a good one, and anyone who doesn’t vote for it will suffer bad press and political negatives for opposing it. If each of these items were required to be in a bill of their own, this tactic would be rendered useless, and legislation that achieves approval would be much cleaner, more appropriate, and less harmful.

Sometimes a bill is so long that in the busy atmosphere of legislative work some representatives and senators simply cannot read every word and effectively study the bill in the amount of time allotted before a vote is scheduled. They then are only partially prepared to cast a knowledgeable vote.

Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat Representative from California whose tenure as Speaker of the House blessedly ends with the 117th Congress on December 31, once said something to the effect of, “we have to pass the bill to find out what is in it.”

No, that isn’t the way a democratic republic passes legislation.

Republican Representative Morgan Griffith represents Virginia’s Ninth Congressional District, which covers 19 counties completely, and parts of three others, and is the Congressman for our region of the Commonwealth.

In one of his regular emails to his constituents, titled “Return to the Basics,” Griffith cites the need for changes, and says with the control of the House of Representatives moving to the Republican Party in the 118th Congress, it is time to make needed changes to the Rules of the House.

Of his suggestions, he wrote, “Most of these amendments restore old rules or clarify existing rules. It would mean a return to the basics of parliamentary procedure.” And, he recently testified before the House Rules Committee to offer those amendments to the rules.

He suggested restoring the Holman Rule, which was created in 1876. It was a tool that could cut government spending.

“One of my proposed rules changes is to restore the Holman Rule, which existed for more than 100 years,” he wrote. “[T]he Holman Rule was created by Congressman William Holman … [who] thought spending was out of control.”

“The Holman Rule allows representatives to offer retrenchment amendments on the floor of the House of Representatives to appropriations bills,” Griffith wrote. “Retrenchment means these amendments could rearrange an agency or department of the Federal Government to cut specific programs, positions, or salaries. In 2017, I revived this rule for the 115th Congress, but in 2019 Speaker Pelosi dismantled this tool,” he wrote.

He also suggested a change to the germaneness rule, that would only allow amendments to a bill that pertained to the bill’s purpose, and suggested that a bill could only have one purpose. He also suggested that those limitations could not be waived without a two-thirds vote of the House.

“Shouldn’t a bill address one issue and be straight forward,” he asked? “My single purpose rule would make it so. This rule would still allow for complex bills like an infrastructure bill. However, two bills or concepts could not be combined into a single bill unless their purposes were the same. For example, a bill to set doctors’ reimbursement rates under Medicare could not be amended into a rewrite of Medicare. To rewrite Medicare would require a separate bill.”

“Additionally, I proposed an amendment to set time limits for bill introduction. This would focus individual members on bills that the members are most passionate about,” Griffith wrote. “It would also reduce the practice of introducing a bill on the cause celebre of the day for publicity purposes,” and “allows a remedy for bills that are ‘truly’ important by giving members the ability to ask the House for permission to introduce their ‘vital’ bill late.”

These common-sense ideas, and others included in Griffith’s email, would go a long way to restoring the legislative process to a form that is straight forward, efficient, and offers more protection from political manipulation than the current process. As he wrote, “a return to the basics of parliamentary procedure.”

Is it too much to hope that a majority of House members will agree with these good ideas, and vote to adopt them?