Parliaments and Legislatures Series Samuel C. Patterson, General Advisory Editor

199 Pages·2007·12.65 MB·English

Parliaments and Legislatures Series
Samuel C. Patterson, General Advisory Editor
Parliaments and Legislatures Series
General Advisory Editor
Samuel C. Patterson, Ohio State University, USA
The aims of this series are to enhance knowledge about the well-established
legislative assemblies of North America and western Europe and to pub­
lish studies of parliamentary assemblies worldwide—from Russia and the
former Soviet bloc nations to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The series
is open to a wide variety of theoretical applications, historical dimensions,
data collections, and methodologies.
Editorial Board
Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Ohio State University, USA
David W. Brady, Stanford University, USA
Gary W. Cox, University of California, San Diego, USA
Erik Damgaard, University of Aarhus, Denmark
C. E. S. Franks, Queen's University, Canada
John R. Hibbing, University of Nebraska, USA
Keith Jackson, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Carlos Flores Juberfas, University of Valencia, Spain
Gerhard Loewenberg, University of Iowa, USA
Werner J. Patzelt, Dresden Technical University, Germany
Thomas F. Remington, Emory University, USA
Suzanne S. Schiittemeyer, Universitat Liineburg, Germany
liter Turan, K09 University, Turkey
Hitching a Ride

Omnibus Legislating
in the U.S. Congress
GLEN S. KRUTZ
Ohio State University Press
Columbus
Copyright © 2001 by The Ohio State University.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Catologing-in-Publication Data
Krutz, Glen S.
Hitching a ride : omnibus legislating in the U. S. Congress / Glen S. Krutz.
p. cm.— (Parliaments and legislatures series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8142-0870-3 (cloth) —ISBN 0-8142-5071-8 (pbk.)
1. Legislation—United States. I. Title. II. Series.
KF4945 .K78 2001
32873*0778—dc21
00-012684
Text design by Nighthawk Design.
Jacket design by David Drummond.
Type set in Adobe Caslon by Bookcomp.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Julie, Matthew, Ryan, and Rachel

Contents
Foreword ix

Acknowledgments xiii

1 Focusing Attention on Omnibus Legislation 1

2 The Nature of Congressional Change: Literature
and Theory 16

3 The Logic of Omnibus Legislation: An Integrated
Theoretical Framework 30

4 Studying Omnibus Lawmaking Systematically 44

5 Hitching a Ride on the Omnibus 61

6 Explaining the Move to Omnibus Legislating 77

7 The Birth of Omnibus Legislating: Why the 81st
Congress Bundled the Budget 88

8 Getting around Gridlock I: Making Health Care
Policy through Omnibus BiEs 102

9 Getting around Gridlock II: The Effect of Omnibus
Utilization on Legislative Productivity 112

10 The Omnibus Change and Presidential-Congressional
Relations 124

11 Evaluating Omnibus Legislating 135

Appendix 1 Constructing a Data Set of Bills per Congress 143

Appendix 2 The Policy Agendas Project Topic and
Subtopic Categories 145
viii Contents
Notes 159

Bibliography 167

Index 179
Foreword
The United States Congress engages resolutely and routinely in the fashion­
ing and enactment of laws. It is in the primacy of its lawmaking role that
the U.S. Congress is distinguishable from most other national parliaments.
Because Congress is, first and foremost, a lawmaking body, its legislative
workload and performance are of prime significance in coming to under­
stand the institution. Moreover, the congressional workload is relatively quite
large in volume and complexity. In the 1990s several thousand bills and res­
olutions were introduced in the average Congress (for instance, 7,532 bills
and 200 joint resolutions were introduced in the 105th Congress, which sat
from 1997 to 1999). And, on the average in the 1990s, each Congress, in its
two-year lifetime, enacted about four hundred public bills.
In short, the congressional agenda of legislative work is somewhat
daunting in scope. As the demand for legislative productivity has expanded,
congressional leaders have adopted a variety of strategies to cope with the
escalating workload. One strategy entails merging a number of legislative
proposals that otherwise might be considered independently into a single,
overarching bill, aptly called "omnibus legislation." This practice of "pack­
aging" or "bundling" a number of legislative proposals into one large leg­
islative measure has been engaged in for about half a century. Dubbed
"mega-bills" by congressional scholar Roger Davidson, the first significant
omnibus bill was the Omnibus Appropriation Act of 1950, which at the
time was the largest appropriation bill in the history of the Republic. Since
then, omnibus bills frequently have concerned financial legislation—bud-
geting, appropriations, taxing—but other issue areas have experienced
omnibus legislating as well. An early instance was President Jimmy Carter's
1977 national energy plan, considered by Congress in the form of an
omnibus package. This energy package came to be considered by nineteen
committees of the House of Representatives, epitomizing the growing
practice of "multiple referral" of bills to committees and precipitating the
emergence of leadership mechanisms designed to coordinate congressional
handling of complex legislation.
IX
x Foreword
As Glen Krutz carefully demonstrates, omnibus legislating has grown
in use, apparently peaking in the 1980s at about one-fifth of all major leg­
islation. Although only a minority of congressional bills are of the omnibus
type, some of the most important legislation of the contemporary era have
taken the form of omnibus measures. Since the passage of the Congres­
sional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which reshaped the
congressional budget process, most omnibus bills have involved budget
legislation. Because of the centrality of budget issues to the national policy
debate today, omnibus legislation has become a highly important congres­
sional practice. Yet mega-bill processing by Congress has heretofore been
only rarely studied systematically. Accordingly, Krutz's seminal, meticulous,
and wide-ranging analysis of omnibus legislating makes a very significant
contribution to understanding the legislative process in Congress.
Krutz develops empirical desiderata for identifying omnibus bills in
Congress, and then carefully assays the historical development of omnibus
legislating. Having established the incidence of mega-bills, Krutz brings
down upon this growing congressional practice the impressive armamen­
tarium of modern empirical research technology: computer database devel­
opment and multivariate analytical procedures. The upshot is a highly orig­
inal and probing examination of omnibus legislating, suffused with savvy
of congressional politics and procedures, sensitive theoretical insights, and
pertinent historical grounding. The author delineates the development of
legislative packaging and explains why congressional leaders have come
to employ mega-bills for important legislation.
The complexity of modern public policy issues, especially those arising
in the budgetary process, and the intricacy of contemporary congressional
politics, have given rise to omnibus legislating. Krutz's trenchant analysis
focuses on how omnibus legislating is invoked to confront problems of
policy gridlock in order to enhance Congress's legislative productivity, and
how mega-bills reflect and influence relations between Congress and the
president. In the end, he observes, "Much major lawmaking is undertaken
with this method, and a significant proportion of legislative initiatives in
Congress see the light at the end of the legislative process because they
become attached to omnibus bills." It is, therefore, the case that "omnibus
bills alter the traditional lawmaking process in many ways."
Finally, Krutz draws upon his extensive research, including interviews
with congressional "insiders/7 to take stock of the modern U.S. Congress
complete with its omnibus lawmaking ways. Weighing the shortcomings
and benefits of omnibus legislating, at the end of the day Krutz concludes