There was extended public debate and a prolonged amendment process for CISA and PCNA in both houses of Congress. There was intense media coverage and, once CISA passed in October, the consensus was that CISA was going to be the law of the land.
The one uncertainty about it was the extent to which the House would drag CISA towards PCNA's broader law enforcement language. Thankfully, that drama, with its attendant opportunity for "public commentary", didn't happen.
For you to make a strong case for how important a prolonged conference committee would have been to the process, I think you should start by pointing out another bill that died in a conference committee due to public outcry. Has that ever happened?
For those who are interested, this type of application is fairly recent. The Reconciliation Act was passed in 74. It hadn't even been out a year before it was being used in ways not anticipated by the sponsors, and the stretching has continued year-after-year. Relevant wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_(United_States_...
IIRC, CORBA was the first big "win", providing continuing insurance privileges to folks when they left their job. A great idea, no doubt, but not a damned thing to do with the budget.
Also more information: https://www.votetocracy.com/blog/what-is-reconciliation
Interesting historical quote from the second article. President Clinton attempted to use reconciliation to pass his 1993 health care plan, but Senator Byrd, according to Wikipedia, “insisted that the health care plan was out of bounds for a process that is theoretically about budgets,”
Times have changed. Each year these things get easier and easier.
I am sad.
In message board land, the fact that the bill was finalized in the middle of the night is evidence that The Man is trying to sneak CISA past us. In reality, nobody in Congress cares about CISA; that's a done deal. It's the budget they're being sneaky about.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that CISA (and a bunch of other random stuff in the budget bill) had been scheduled to go through on the budget bill for weeks.
Schoolhouse rocks, last I checked, had one bill moving from one house to the other. Citizens could lobby at any point, including the conference committee.
Each of these were passed in isolation, then stuck together, then stuck into a budget bill. Then the only question was whether you wanted the entire bill to pass or not.
It's a fair interpretation to say that some reasonable public feedback -- if nothing else than what kinds of compromises needed to occur between both bills -- was missing from the mash-up we got this past week. Yes, majorities approved of similar bills in both houses. But there was no point in time where the public was informed "Hey, this is your last chance if you want to change what's going to go into the law"
Another way of looking at this is asking this question: if we're going to use the rules for budget bills on everything else that might be controversial, why have conference committees at all? Just pass kinda the same thing in each house and then look for the right political moment and the right combination of things to lump together so that you can do whatever you want to.
This is just leadership writing laws. If they want to do things like that, fine. I believe the logical conclusion is that we should start having direct election of house and senate leadership.