This framing is also sort of a misrepresentation. It's an annual government-funding bill, and it includes some money for COVID relief. All of the broader criticisms about horse trading still apply of course but those apply just as much to separate bills with informal agreements on votes. The only difference is it's really inconvenient to hold hundreds of votes in order to make sure the forestry service janitors get paid, etc. etc.

> This framing is also sort of a misrepresentation

The title of this post is: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming

Are you sure? Why are we passing completely new laws in our yearly budget bill? What does streaming laws have to do with paying forestry service janitors?

Maybe we wouldn't have a government shutdown emergency every year if our representatives didn't try to shoehorn their pet laws and their <strike>customers'</strike>lobbyists' favorite regulations in at the same time.

Interestingly, the Confederate constitution banned these types of bills.

Washington State has a single-subject rule that affects both bills in legislature and ballot measures[1]. We've regularly had poorly crafted voter initiatives tossed out by the WA State Supreme Court on this basis.

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Laws_governing_the_initiative_proces...

> It's absurd that everyone is forced to evaluate and have a single opinion/vote on all these completely separate issues as a unit.

They aren't forced to, except by their own (collective) consent. They could vote to split the bill, propose smaller bills and vote down the bigger ones in preference, etc.

Conglomerate bills are a tool to reach mutually tolerable compromise.

> mutually tolerable compromise

This is just politispeak for quid-pro-quo. If conglomerate bills are outlawed then maybe we can vote on issues instead of on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched.

There are enough politicians willing to hold up important stuff until their backs are scratched, that nothing useful would ever get done. And there are enough voters who are uninformed or unwilling to hold those politicians to account at the polls that there are no negative consequences for this behavior.

Stated another way, I'd rather a world where nothing gets done for a term and constituents are pissed at their greedy selfish representatives and they're forced to start playing the game straight, than the world where we just let this continue forever.

> constituents are pissed at their greedy selfish representatives

And what I'm saying is this never happens in America. Politics is a team sport and voters just blame the other team. We've just had the worst pandemic in living memory and the worst economic contraction in a generation and nearly every Senator won re-election despite months of inaction.

Even with this in mind, conglomerate bills are only an enabler of this bad behavior. The underlying problem is the back scratching in the first place, I'd rather bring it to a head and force the politicians and their constituents to resolve the underlying problem than to just let it continue unabated forever.

What you call 'backscratching' is backroom negotiation, necessary in order to pass laws under the current system. It's undemocratic and has bad results, but being locked is worse.

> This is just politispeak for quid-pro-quo.

Yes, compromise and quid-pro-quo are the same thing. So what?

> If conglomerate bills are outlawed then maybe we can vote on issues instead of on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched.

You are voting on issues either way, and, cynically, voting on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched, either way. A single subject rule, such as is in place in the California legislature and several other state legislatures, simply reduces scope within which compromise can occur (or, alternatively, just makes the legislative compromises more complex and opaque as mechanisms are found to obey the technical requirements of the rule while evading its substantive intent, such as building in contingencies in one bill that are triggered by the passage or not of another bill.)

Quid-pro-quo isn't the problem, being able to trade-off across issues is a good thing.

The problem is legislators serving powerful narrow interests rather than the broad public interest, but narrowing the permitted scope of individual enactments doesn't do anything to help that.

> Quid-pro-quo isn't the problem, being able to trade-off across issues is a good thing.

It can be a good thing sometimes. But it can be also used for "do the thing you'd otherwise never agree to for your thing to pass" which is more of an ultimatum. Or even, "yeah, and add an aircraft carrier to that" to block some effort completely. (I think that was a recent relief bill, but can't find the link now)

I don't think that confronts the clustering of unrelated issues. It seems much more to be a tool of hiding things behind the ability to make blanket statements about who voted for certain bills when the complexity to explain why is far beyond how involved most voters will be.

One might argue that conglomerate bills are the result of deal making: You want this? I want this.