Reply #9: I agree with you MH

[TayTay]

I tried pointing this out as well. I am not surprised that Sen. Kerry agreed to this and offered up the provision that makes it a better bill and capable of passing Constitutional muster. (That part where the vetoed items come back to Congress for a 50% + 1 vote.) Kerry has always been for making government as open as possible and this goes to that long held concern.

Right now there are a Omnibus funding bills that get rushed through Congress that contains hundreds and hundreds of pages of individual funding assignments. (These are the earmarks that people like John McCain claim are ruining the budget and riving up the deficit.) These Omnibus bills are subject to the 'up-or-down' rule of all appropriation bills in the Senate. So, like in '04 or '05, a bill that no one in Congress reads, that can be for up to $70 billion dollars or more, gets passed because Congress is in a hurry to go home for the Holidays. (This is nuts and very, very bad government.) Allegedly, the 1994 Republican take-over of Congress was done because people wanted to stop the Democrats from doing this type of thing.

It didn't work out that way. Omnibus bills are getting much worse, not better. The Rethugs don't want to shown as voting for specific programs that might endanger them in front of the voters. This forces them to own up to all their spending habits, like approving that ludicrous bridge to nowhere in Alaska. It also calls Bush's bluff as a 'smaller taxes and smaller government' guy. Okay, then prove it, veto the pet legislation for the funding of the History of Switch Grass Musuem in the Congressional district of one of the leading Repubs in the House. Go ahead, veto it, I dare you. (Then make Congressman X defend this bidget line item and, if necessary, take a real vote and record the number of Rethugs who vote for it, cuz they don't want to piss off Congressman X.)

This is a win-win for good government. It makes the Congress actually legislate again instead of passing everything in bad bills that no one reads, no one understands and that is killing the US budget.