Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what business does any of this have in a Coronavirus relief bill? We didn’t have a coronavirus relief bill until yesterday. Bridging votes is part of policy negotiation.
5,500 pages of bridging votes? A bill that's so large that people literally don't have the ability to read it before they vote on it? Policy negotiations are normal. This is not normal. I mean, heck, why bring up separate bills in Congress at all? Let's put off all legislation for the entire year and then we'll pass everything as one bill when it comes time for the spending bill. We don't even need to meet during the…
I'm not defending omnibus bills here nor was I above. I was defending pork. Even small bills are susceptible to legislation unrelated to the headline title sneaking in. That isn't always a bad thing.
> there are obvious lines we can cross where there's no reason for a bill to be so bloated and discordant
Conciseness takes work. Messes are easy. Rushed bills are heavy because the work of whittling it down hasn't been done.
In this case, I happened to be close to a senior Senate staffer as this bill was getting wrapped up. The way it works is each team takes a section and masters it. Tracks it from start to finish, keeps tabs on interested and affected parties, and reaches out to experts for clarification where necessary. This gets compiled into notes for senior staffers who distill it into policy and negotiating points for the elected. When I asked detailed question about the bill, knowledgeable answers came back within minutes. There is no Gell-Mann amnesia, at least not on this Senator's team. Anybody claiming they didn't have time to review the legislation is lying, unprepared or incompetent.
I agree something is given up by not having any single person with complete knowledge of the bill. But in a crisis, you don't have a choice between a concise non-existent bill and the hodgepodge. It's between the uncased sausage and going hungry. This was a self-inflicted crisis. There were months to do what was pushed against a deadline. In that, I find institutional failing. But given the deadline and the process, a big bill with some junk in it is not a bad outcome.