Word: omnibus
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Talk about spoiling the broth. Imagine trying to prepare dinner with 199 cooks watching every move. Something like that is happening on Capitol Hill, where a mammoth conference committee is trying to reconcile differences in the omnibus trade bills passed last year by the House and Senate. Under the direction of two Democratic leaders -- Representative Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois and Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas -- the 199 members of the committee, along with 300 or so staffers and 100 briefcase carriers sent over by the White House, have been meeting in 17 subgroups in an all-out effort...
...logic behind a line item veto is simple. By putting the entire federal budget into a single omnibus spending package, which the president must ratify in its entirety or veto (thereby shutting down the complete federal bureaucracy), legislators can insert a number of pork-barrel expenditures to please their constituents and improve their re-election chances. That is simply the nature of the legislative beast...
...pork-barrel expenditures included in the last omnibus spending bill, signed just before winter recess, range from the slightly humorous--$240,000 for a study of the damage done to macademia nuts by rats--to the seriously expensive--$25 million for an unneeded new airport in Fort Worth near the home territory Speaker of the House Jim Wright. In the several-thousand pages of an omnibus appropriations bill, these expenditures can be shielded from constituents, and congressmen can hide their support for these perks by claiming that they voted for the whole package, not individual appropriations...
...omnibus appropriations package is too wasteful, the president can pick out the most superfluous expenditures and veto the entire bill because of them. Then he could promise to sign the same bill into law, as long as the offensive appropriations were excluded...
...Reagan's rhetoric about how Congress has stuffed omnibus spending packages--charges that often ring true--the president has signed the giant omnibus packages and vetoed only a handful of smaller appropriations bills. The result has been enormous budget deficits...