Senator John McCain, speaking to Tim Russert on Meet The Press about the “Istook Amendment” in the new omnibus spending bill said “What happens here is that they slap these omnibus bills together–as you mentioned, this one’s nine bills that we should have passed separately–nobody sees them or reads them. It was a 1,630- page document yesterday that was presented to us sometime in the morning, and we voted on it in the evening. The system is broken”.

The problem is “omnibus legislation”. The practice of combining disparate measures in one massive bill enables lawmakers (on both sides) to hide more undesirable measures among thousands of sections and subsections cobbled together at the last minute.

With regard to the “Istook Amendment” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said: “I have no earthly idea how it got in there. Nobody is going to defend this.” But that is the point - in the effort to gain institutional efficiency lawmakers don’t know half of what is in these bills when they vote on them!