Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Process for Congressional Voting

The Washington Times says, "Congress fast-tracks bills loaded with special interest projects in year-end rush".
The House of Representatives will shut down on any new legislation passage on December 11. The Senate is scheduled to be operating through the end of the year, except for weekends and holidays. Both houses want to push through some legislation before the end of the year.
For example, there is a massive Defense Policy Bill and various tax breaks bills. Some of these, such as the Defense Policy Bill are important and urgent, but, they are loaded with pork.
Standard procedure in both houses of Congress is to negotiate a bills contents in order to obtain enough votes for the bill's passage. This is usually done by some sort of pork process. For example, if a major bill is intended to supply our military with the latest technology in military equipment, it may be necessary to obtain the vote of a representative or senator to include in the bill an allocation for building a chicken house in his area. This process usually works to the advantage of the chicken house advocate, because of the necessity of passing the major objective of the bill. However in the voting process, there is usually a lot of argument and consternation, which I believe is unnecessary. I suggest that r Epresentatives and Senators rethink their attitudes and concentrate on the importance of the major aspects of a particular bill and basically ignore pork additions other accepting them in order to achieve enough votes for the total bill's passage.
Congress has a later opportunity to go through the details of the law, if passed by both houses and signed by the president, and take out the pork or at least neutralize it by a defunding process. This may seem onerous with respect to other business requirements in Congress, but it need not be so. Congressmen and Senators will easily recognize a pork situation, if presented quickly and clearly to them and vote against its continuance. None of this will take much time. There is a possibility a filibuster from the pork proponent, but the new Congress in January should easily have enough votes to kill any such ridiculous filibuster in support of a pork situation.

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