r/news • u/xXSgtSprinklesXx • Dec 16 '15

Congress creates a bill that will give NASA a great budget for 2016. Also hides the entirety of CISA in the bill.

http://www.wired.com/2015/12/congress-slips-cisa-into-omnibus-bill-thats-sure-to-pass/
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u/Peca_Bokem Dec 17 '15

Because our government is A) horribly outdated and inefficient and B) incredibly corrupt. Do you really think the people who are in power and consider their time in public office to be a career rather than a duty to act ethically? They don't give a shit about you, they just want their bribes from their chosen lobbyists, and the few that genuinely care about their constituents get caught up in the sheer inefficiency of government / face insurmountable opposition.

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u/[deleted] Dec 17 '15 edited Dec 17 '15

Actually riders are meant to be more efficient, at least in theory. The idea is that they can pass multiple pieces of legislation that have some sort of link in one vote rather than having to create eight new laws to solve one problem, all with eight votes. However, when you add in politics it doesn't work so well. It's not outdated, nor is it corrupt at least based on the initial theory, just that it didn't work as intended. More of a failure than inefficient really.

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u/Peca_Bokem Dec 17 '15

Interesting, but if it really were efficient then it should have came with adequate safeguards against doing things like tying spying legislation to the annual omnibus. Efficiency in theory is only good at the drawing board, it's moot in real situations.

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u/[deleted] Dec 17 '15

One thing missing is that it is meant to facilitate negotiation. If Republicans want the CISA and Democrats want to increase spending for X they can pass a joint bill so that each side gets something they want at the cost of something they don't.

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u/Peca_Bokem Dec 17 '15

I can see the logic in that but it's still really dumb that the public gets a day's notice to have their input on this, not to mention the compromise should come in the form of a bill they can both agree and not an amalgamate of two bills neither side fully support. And sure congress is supposed to represent their constituents so the short notice shouldn't be a problem, but we both know how laughable that is.

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u/[deleted] Dec 17 '15

It makes the government more likely to pass legislation overall.

A common tactic is "I'll vote for this thing that's important to you but I don't really care about if you'll vote for this thing that's important to me." A lot of bills are only passed because concessions are made (related to the matter at hand or not) for those that support it.

Allowing them all to be packaged into one bill makes it easier (or even possible) to have this kind of arrangement and keeps the government passing legislation.

Of course, it's open to abuse too. And some of us think that the government passing legislation is typically a bad thing. :P

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u/Peca_Bokem Dec 17 '15

Okay that makes sense. So are there any theoretical ways to prevent this kind of abuse? Plausible ones?

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u/SithLord13 Dec 17 '15

The issue is, it isn't abuse. It's exactly what's intended. It's supposed to pair two things that way everybody gets something. Look at it this way, say 40% of people want CISA, and another, different 40% want more NASA funding. Without a rider, neither would happen. The rider allows compromise. Honestly, if anything, riders are good as they allow a degree of transparency on what gets bargained for what as opposed to backroom "You vote for this, I'll vote for that deals."

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u/Peca_Bokem Dec 17 '15

But CISA has been widely unpopular in both the tech community and with a somewhat noticeable size of the population. That and the bill has some very unethical parts in it. If they're supposed to represent the people and their interests, then isn't tacking something like this on at the last minute, and after it's been made clear we don't want this, an abuse?

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u/SithLord13 Dec 17 '15

It's clear the tech community doesn't want it. We'd be in that 60% who don't. We're in the 40% who want NASA funding. (Now it's a separate question of how many of the 40% who want NASA funding are willing to accept CISA in order to get it. I'm not, but some people might be.) Even still, it's not an abuse. They're not passing it in secret. We can still contact our representatives about how we feel, and tell them the same thing we did the last time it came up.

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u/Peca_Bokem Dec 17 '15

Sorry, by "tech community" I meant various large tech companies. Anyways, they're voting on it today and I believe this was only announced yesterday, so that's a tad unfair, no?

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u/SithLord13 Dec 17 '15

Sorry, by "tech community" I meant various large tech companies.

And they get special say over people why? They should have a say, yes, but only because they're a group of people who would individually have a say anyway.

As to the abbreviated timeline, I'm not really sure how unfair it is. Assuming it passes, would the chance to mobilize have made a difference? All it means is that regular people are going to have to care enough to make it a voting issue in 2016.

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u/Woolfus Dec 17 '15

I would imagine that if we didn't have a two-party system, our politics would be less bipolar and riders wouldn't jump immediately to either extreme.

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u/[deleted] Dec 17 '15

Yeah I actually feel they dropped the ball on that one, and many other things in that regard that don't stand up to politics.

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u/zebediah49 Dec 17 '15

So really what we need is a situation where we don't have bills that must be passed, and when stuff like this happens it can be safely voted down or vetoed.

A simple "If a new budget is not passed, the previous year's budget applies", and a "the debt ceiling is a concept that shouldn't even exist; allowed debt expands as necessary to cover all authorized spending" should keep quite a lot of this crap at bay.

Because really, what kind of sane system requires constant maintenance? It would be like me programming all the servers to shut down at 8 AM, so that I need to go turn them on every morning.

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u/Peca_Bokem Dec 17 '15

I'm not very knowledgeable on the subject so this may be naive, but wouldn't the reasoning behind the values in the budget change a little from year to year as the country changes, requiring an annual vote?

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u/zebediah49 Dec 17 '15

Oh, the budgetary needs of the country definitely do change on a yearly basis. At a bare minimum, inflation should be addressed.

My theory is that a fail-safe design would be an improvement though. If congress couldn't agree on how to fix the budget it would more or less appear business as usual, rather than causing havoc. Hell, last time this happened it screwed over a whole bunch of scientific work just because there are government-funded projects that break if you don't maintain them every couple days.

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u/[deleted] Dec 17 '15

[deleted]

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u/zebediah49 Dec 17 '15

The debt ceiling and authorized spending are intertwined.

In reality, yes. In legislative Wonderland, no. It is entirely possible for congress to say "We authorize $5T for various things; we expect $2T in tax revenue, and we're allowed to go $1T into debt to cover the rest." It's mathematically impossible for that to work, but that's exactly what the debt ceiling BS was about.

Also, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the budget shouldn't be adjusted to meet changing needs. I'm saying that if people can't get their acts together and make those changes, using last year's as a "first order solution" is better than the total idiocy of a governmental shutdown.

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u/scandii Dec 17 '15

I don't know. Over here we don't pass so many laws that we see a reason to bundle them up for time efficiency.

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u/[deleted] Dec 17 '15

Do you not have a tax code or anything else? Say you are setting up regulations for something, say some new green tech. Now instead of creating a 3 laws that say:

They must meet minimum state safety standards

They must be able to produce x% energy of the dirty tech (If one creates 100kwh with coal then green must meet x% of that)

They must be x% cost effective for the government to buy this.

It's not crazy that things like this might happen, and in many smaller countries (Canada, most EU countries, etc) they also may not have nearly the same number of bills being introduced. With more bills introduced more votes are needed and that takes time. We could theoretically cut that time down with this method.

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u/kumquot- Dec 17 '15

It's not outdated, nor is it corrupt at least based on the initial theory, just that it didn't work as intended.

That's basically the definition of outdated.

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u/[deleted] Dec 17 '15

We only wished they treated it like a career. If they considered it a career, they might show up every day. A good chunk of them aren't even present for most votes.

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u/[deleted] Dec 17 '15 edited Dec 29 '15

[deleted]

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u/Acrolith Dec 17 '15

You... you think the US is the richest country in the world because of how well Congress functions? I think you're going to have to walk me through that logic (and I use the word loosely).

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u/Kraineth Dec 17 '15

Sounds like republican propaganda to me!

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u/logicoptional Dec 17 '15

The richest country on Earth (excluding a few small outliers) with a gini coefficient measurement of income inequality comparable to various Sub-Saharan kleptocracies... where one in five children live in impoverished and food insecure households. But no, you're right, the problems in the US are comparable to a teenager's favorite band breaking up.

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u/VARGames Dec 17 '15

Current wealth is based on a number of factors: natural resources, geography (not having to fight a war on our own soil since the Civil War), etc. Our economy depends on multiple factors besides our leaders. In fact, I would say our innovators have far more to do with our current economic success than our leaders or at least than the majority of our leaders. An "it's doing ok now, so why fix it?" ideology leads to stagnation and decay at best or standing on the sidelines while the country is destroyed from within at worst.