– III). Ending Pork Barrel Spending & The Practice of Legislative Riders

Propose and  Pass a  Legislative Topical Compliance Review Bill (LTCR)

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE ACTUAL LTCR PROPOSAL ON U4PREZ

The amendment process is often abused to to allow for the use of riders in the bill drafting process.  Often it is done  to pass a poor piece of legislation by attaching it to a good piece of legislation. This allows for an original  bill of merit to be rewritten to include often off  topic, unrelated bills that are usually without merit or just bad legislation that have no or little chance of becoming law on their own. The representative or representatives attachings the poor and unrelated  rider hopes that it will pass due to desire or need that others in Congress see in passing  the main, original part of the bill.   It is a treacherous practice of legislative insincerity that often accounts for the funding of unrelated pet projects which amounts to an overwhelming amount of pork barrel spending.

Riders also enable stealthy passage of laws such as recent federal hate crimes legislation which was passed after it become a rider on the defense appropriations bill.

To put an end to this deceitful and finacially innapproriate practice I will prompt the passage of  the Legislative Topical Compliance Review Bill (LTCR)

The bill will mandate that any and all legislation drafted and presented for consideration before either house of Congress, or their appropriate committees, must be disected and proven to not contain spending, appropriations, regulations, guidelines, legal precedents or changes that do not directly relate to the intention and or purpose of the original propsed legislationand what it was designed to effect.  Such review must be conducted  by a panel of nonpartisan, existing legal counsel, within the nonpartisan Office of Management and Budget.  This legislative review responsibility will be assigned as a responsibility that will an addition to the already existing responsibilities of OMB’s legislative review process.   This panel will have to insure that each piece of legislation before them does involve unrelated issues and that unrelated riders and amendments and funding initiatives  are not attached to the individual pieces of legislation before them.  Once the bill is deemed “topically compliant” it can go before the pertinent committes.  Once voted out of committee, the bill will have to go through OMB’s legislative review process again to insure that is remains “topically compliant” and it must be reviewed a third and final time before it goes before a final vote on the on the floors of both branches of Congress.

Without a presidential line item veto available, this measure will insure that all spending and all legislative action is accepted or  rejected based on its own merits and not due to political slights of hand and games.