Anonymous law making

I'm not sure if you'd be able to track that down if you went through all the original bill's proposed amendments on the Thomas Locator or not. I suppose it would depend on how it got inserted. Some amendments are brought up directly on the floor and those would be in Thomas, but others get inserted while the bill is making it way through any one of various committies and those probably wouldn't be.

Without going to DC and looking at all the relevant paperwork you may never be able to find out who the actual person that inserted it was. My guess is that there are thousands of these every year. They are also referred to as "riders".

Oh. I thought this would be about all the rules and regulations passed by various agencies, like IRS, DOT, OSHA, et.al. I doubt you'd ever track down any of those.

That sounds interesting too, roger.

So it sounds like you're saying this is a normal occurrence, fishin. It just seems to me that amending the Insurrection Act is a fairly significant change that should be debated, or at the very least authored by someone willing to defend it.

Amending the Insurrection Act isn't "usual" but tacking on riders (aka "markups") is a daily thing in Congress. If you look at the legislative history of pretty much any bill you'll find that there are two or three proposed amendments that have nothing to do with the primary purpose of the bill itself.

If a congressman wants a new bridge in their district they tack it onto an education bill, etc... The Defense Appropriation Bill is always a favorite target for riders because the thing is so huge that very few people actually read it. And since our system is setup where a bill is passed (or not) in it's entirety, if the rider is thrown in and no one catches it to object, it passes with the bill.

The rider issue has been used as one of the reasons to support a line item veto. If the Line Item Veto were Constitutional, the President could line out the riders they disagree with (if they caught them!).

The whole issue was one of several that the Democrats claimed they were going to attempt to tackle after they regained control of Congress last election. So far it doesn't seem to be going anywhere but... ya never know!

Are riders always anonymous, though? In the bridge example, doesn't the bridge guy want credit for that?

(I know nothing about any of this, just reading with interest.)

Right! They aren't always anonymous.

It depends on what the item is and what the press coverage of it is. What's that "bridge to nowhere" up in Alaska that got tacked onto some bill (last year? year before?). I'm sure the person that got it tacked on thought it was a great idea to advertise it in their district. At least until it became known nationally and was seen as massive waste.

If they want credit they'll usually do the add-on in a public forum - on the floor or in a recorded committee hearing. If they don't want it known they have some staffer slip it into the bill while it is being typed up.

I knew what you meant, fishin. And I knew that riders are how pork gets into spending bills. Somehow in my mind, though, I thought it was limited to money. I didn't know you could amend existing laws with a rider. It's all new to me.

Actually, many of these "anonymous" provisions are inserted during conference committees, where differing senate and house versions of a bill are reconciled. The conference committees are usually not open to the public and no records are kept of their private deliberations. In essence, two bills go into the black box of the conference committee and one bill magically emerges from it. It is during that magical period that these mysterious provisions are added. That's not supposed to happen (because that would mean that something the senate and house never voted on in the original bills would be in the final version of the bill), but it nevertheless happened with alarming frequency during the last six years.

So, in that case joe, could someone look at the house bill that passed and the senate bill that passed, and if the provision wasn't in either of those, determine that it was inserted during the reconciliation?

This is quite common, and it is also usually understood that if a Representative's home district is suddenly the beneficiary of Federal largesse, that he or she is responsible, even without his or her name appearing on the "rider." In fact, the most common form of "rider" is a grant of citizenship to someone from the district of the member who adds the rider, and then they definitely don't want their name on it.

As this story from Common Dreams (not an unbiased source) indicates, riders are viewed suspiciously by many groups.

Yep, that would be the culprit.

That's an interesting litle tidbit! Who would have thought that? Heh, I think pretty much everybody assumes that riders are just pork projects.