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Re:We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill by tfha on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @09:49AM (#15969944)
How can we fight against these patterns? Amendments? Force bills to be broken up? Only allow a bill to be submitted once a decade?

Our system is definitely broken, but I have no idea what type of changes might prevent these abuses

Re:We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill by haZard_OS on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @11:06AM (#15970750)
Robert's Rules of Order (the Cadillac of parliamentary procedure texts) contains a few simple rules concerning this issue.

Simply put, no person may add content to a proposal that is not directly related to the original proposal. You want to add a rider to an HHS funding bill to also fund your pet project? Too bad. You want to include language in a standard farm bill about the second amendment? Not gonna happen.

Under these rules, proposals/bills are forced into MUCH smaller packages and the ability of any particular legislator to sneak in lobbied language becomes stymied.

Congress does not have these simple rules in place. We should force them to adopt the relevant section(s) of Robert's Rules of Order.

Re:We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill by FLUX-YOU on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @09:52AM (#15969980)
>How can we fight against these patterns?

Elect enough people willing to self-regulate and pass those bills. The current climate with lobbying money won't ever pass something like that.

Re:We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill by aaronbrethorst on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @09:54AM (#15969997)
What do lobbyists have to do with the NSA?
Re:We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill by FLUX-YOU on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @09:59AM (#15970042)
It wasn't a comment about lobbying for NSA expansion specifically, but I imagine there's plenty of companies who would benefit from NSA expansion that provide services to the US government.
Re:We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill by emidln on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @10:28AM (#15970356)
Forcing bills to be public and unchanged for a week of consideration before voting would be a good start.
Re:We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill by TheDong on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @02:28PM (#15972873)
A week? Why not some odd months so those potentially impacted could read and analyze them and submit feedback.
Re:We Only Have Hours Left to Stop the NSA Expansion Bill by throwmeagain on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @03:32PM (#15973522)
> I have no idea what type of changes might prevent these abuses

As long as a human or group of humans is capable of removing choices for others, there is will be no possible idea of how to prevent the abuse.