Omnibus Bills vs. Single-Subject Legislation

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Three days before Christmas in 2022, Senator Rand Paul rose on the Senate floor to report a defeat. “Just moments ago, I made a budget point of order against a 4,155-page bill spending $1.7 trillion that was given to us in the middle of the night at 1:30 in the morning,” he said. “The point of order was waived, as it always has been by the Senate.”

He was right about the size. He was wrong about the novelty.

Congress bundles because twelve separate spending bills stopped passing on their own and a shutdown is the alternative; the states with a one-subject rule still pass thousand-page bills, because a broad enough title covers anything.

Senators have been giving that speech for decades. In October 1998 John McCain told the Senate that until “less than 48 hours ago, only a few in this body had actually seen this nearly 4,000-page, 40-pound, non-amendable, budget-busting legislation.” In March 2018 the objection was to a 2,232-page bill that nobody had read.

What was actually inside the 2022 bill

Most of it was money. The rest was a session’s worth of unfinished business, filed as lettered divisions: Division P, electoral count reform; Division R, No TikTok on Government Devices; Division T, SECURE 2.0.

Division T cut the penalty for missing a required retirement withdrawal from 25 percent to 10 percent when you fix it in time. Another division made it unlawful to force a pregnant worker onto leave when a reasonable accommodation would let her keep working.

None of those had passed both chambers alone. The electoral count bill never got a floor vote in either house, and GovTrack lists its status as “Enacted Via Other Measures.” The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act passed the House on May 14, 2021 and was never passed by the Senate. SECURE 2.0 passed the House on March 29, 2022 and went to a Senate that never voted on it.

Bundling is why all three are law.

Appropriators say so themselves. Senator Richard Shelby called the March 2022 package “a massive bipartisan effort” resting on a framework that “rejects poison pill policy provisions from both sides.”

Twelve bills, one deadline, and a law that bites

The process assumes “12 regular appropriations measures annually,” one per Appropriations subcommittee in each chamber, and they are meant to be law by October 1, when the fiscal year begins.

Miss the date and the law turns hostile. The Antideficiency Act forbids a federal officer to obligate money “before an appropriation is made unless authorized by law.” An agency with no appropriation cannot spend and cannot promise to.

So Congress buys time. From fiscal 1998 through fiscal 2025, “134 interim CRs” became law, just under five a year.

Then it consolidates. Across fiscal 1986 through fiscal 2016, 22 omnibus measures swallowed “a total of 170 regular appropriations acts.” Molly Reynolds of the Brookings Institution: “the budget process is the only place that members of Congress can host their political disagreements.”

When the time runs out, the bill lands on somebody.

One contract custodian at the U.S. Department of Agriculture was told to stay home for 35 days when the 2018-2019 shutdown began. Contract workers have no claim to back pay; she never got any.

“I had to go to my life insurance company and borrow money that I’m still paying back,” she told Marketplace. Another contractor, on federal safety research, could “only bill for hours worked,” so a closure deleted her pay rather than delaying it.

That is the choice at 1:30 in the morning. Vote for the bill nobody read, or close the government.

The sentence nobody voted on by itself

A provision that could never survive its own vote can survive somebody else’s.

In 1996 a single sentence entered the labor and health title of an omnibus appropriations act. No federal injury-prevention money at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it said, “may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

Jay Dickey, who served four terms as a congressman from Arkansas, wrote it. He spent his last years saying he had gotten it wrong. He told NPR in 2015 that he “did not intend to halt all medical research into gun safety.” His words: “All this time that we have had, we would have found a solution, in my opinion.”

The complaint is not partisan. Senator Elizabeth Warren made it in December 2014 about a banking provision in that year’s spending bill: it “was slipped in at the last minute to benefit Wall Street,” and “was written by lobbyists for Citigroup.”

Small favors hide better than big ones. ProPublica and WNYC read the stimulus bills against Congress’s own definition of an earmark and found “dozens of narrowly defined programs” in a package President Obama had promised would be free of earmarks and pet projects. One was an insurance exemption for “work on boats longer than 65 feet,” benefiting yacht repair yards in Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s South Florida district.

Why there is no rule against it

People assume a rule must exist. One does, and it governs amendments, not bills.

The House germaneness rule has said since 1789 that “No motion or proposition on a subject different from that under consideration shall be admitted under color of amendment.” It says nothing about what a bill contains when written, and the House manual records that a committee may report a bill embracing different subjects.

A second rule aims at riders. House Rule XXI, clause 2 bars spending “not previously authorized by law” and bars legislation on a general appropriation bill. It is not self-executing. A member has to rise and make the point of order, and if nobody does, the words stay in.

The Constitution sets no subject limit either. Congress once gave the President a way to unbundle after the fact: the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 let him cancel “any dollar amount of discretionary budget authority” or any limited tax benefit.

An Idaho cooperative “formed in May 1997 to assist Idaho potato farmers” lost a tax break that way and sued. In Clinton v. City of New York the Court held the Act violated the Presentment Clause, noting that George Washington read it to require he “approve all the parts of a Bill, or reject it in toto.”

No third option exists, and that is what makes a bundle powerful.

The subject rule Congress already enforces

One corner of the Senate polices subject matter with teeth.

The Byrd rule, section 313 of the Congressional Budget Act, applies to reconciliation bills. It lists six tests for whether a provision is “extraneous,” and the one that does the most work strikes any provision whose budget effects are “merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision.” Translation: if the policy is the point and the money is the excuse, out it goes.

The remedy is a scalpel. The offending matter is stricken and the rest of the bill survives, and waiving the rule takes “three-fifths of the membership (60 Senators, if no seats are vacant).”

Most cutting happens before any vote, in a ritual called the Byrd bath: leadership sends “the parliamentarian and Senate Budget Committee staff” through the text hunting violations.

In February 2021 the Senate parliamentarian advised that a federal minimum wage increase could not ride in the filibuster-proof pandemic relief reconciliation bill. Budget Chairman Bernie Sanders said his next step would be an amendment raising wages through the tax code.

A federal subject rule already exists, it works, and what it removed was the provision its sponsors wanted most. A subject rule does not shorten bills. It hands power to whoever decides what a subject is.

What the reform bill actually says

The federal proposal is short. Section 2 of the One Subject at a Time Act provides that each bill or joint resolution “shall embrace no more than one subject.” The subject must be clearly and descriptively expressed in the title, and an appropriations bill may carry no general legislation outside its subject.

It never defines “subject.” It defines the title instead, which makes the title the thing to fight over.

Rand Paul has introduced it Congress after Congress, as S. 1572, S. 3708, S. 110, S. 287 and S. 59. No version has received a vote.

Forty-three states tried it first

Most of the country has already run it.

Michael Gilbert, in the University of Pittsburgh Law Review, traces the rule to Georgia “after the 1795 Yazoo Land Fraud,” where a bill titled as payment for state troops handed vast tracts of public land to private companies. By 1959 some version “had been adopted in forty-three states.”

Minnesota’s clause is one sentence: “No law shall embrace more than one subject, which shall be expressed in its title.”

Courts read it gently. The Minnesota Supreme Court’s standard formulation says the clause exists for “preventing logrolling legislation or omnibus bills,” and asks only whether provisions are germane to one general subject. House Research, the Legislature’s nonpartisan research office, notes courts construe it liberally “to avoid unduly hampering legislative action.”

Drafters answer by writing the title far above the details.

A Minnesota omnibus tax bill “included 16 articles and covered 247 pages.” Its title called it an act relating to “the financing and operation of state and local government.” Buried in article 16, “Miscellaneous,” was a prevailing wage rule for school construction over $100,000.

The Minnesota Supreme Court struck that provision in Associated Builders and Contractors v. Ventura, the first such ruling since 1947. Between 1947 and 1999 no appellate challenge under the clause succeeded at all.

The rule did not produce short bills. The Legislature passed “the 1,400-page plus omnibus bill” in the closing days of the 2024 session. It cleared minutes before midnight on a party-line vote, with Republicans saying they “had no time to read the bill” and chanting “USA! USA!” as it was carried onto the floor. The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus sued, and Judge Castro said the bill had one of the broadest titles conceivable.

When a court voids the whole act

The usual remedy is a scalpel here too. Minnesota’s House Research reports that recent opinions sever the offending provision “from the rest of the act.” Severance fails when a court cannot tell which of two unrelated subjects was primary. Then both fall.

Oklahoma wrote the scalpel into its constitution. Every act must “embrace but one subject, which shall be clearly expressed in its title,” and an offending act is void only as to what the title leaves out.

Its supreme court has not always stopped there.

Douglas sued Cox Retirement Properties for wrongful death, on behalf of a man who died soon after a stay at a rehabilitative care center. The facility moved to dismiss under the Comprehensive Lawsuit Reform Act of 2009, a 90-section overhaul. The Oklahoma Supreme Court held that act “unconstitutional and void in its entirety.” One wrongful death suit took down ninety sections of law that hospitals, insurers and courts had been working under.

The court’s test asks whether subjects have “at least a semblance of relation to each other.” Its illustration was a peanut butter cookie: keep adding chocolate chips, pecans and dried cranberries and it stops being the cookie.

The dissent deserves its strongest form. Justices including Winchester in Douglas argue that the judiciary “should give due deference to the legislature as to the allocation of the subjects within a bill.” Older Oklahoma law agrees that a subject may be “as comprehensive as the legislature chooses to make it.”

Pennsylvania took that road. In Stilp v. Commonwealth its supreme court upheld a bill that set pay formulas for all three branches of state government and tied future raises to federal salaries, finding it kept “the single unifying subject of regulating compensation for State Government officials.”

One subject means what a court says, and courts mostly say it means what the title says.

The rival diagnosis: the calendar, not the subject

A second camp aims at the clock instead of the contents. Biennial budgeting would move Congress to a two-year cycle, which supporters argue would “reduce congressional workload by eliminating the need for annual consideration of routine or repetitious matters.”

The Prevent Government Shutdowns Act would remove the cliff. A lapse triggers an “automatic continuing resolution (CR) on October 1 at last year’s spending levels,” while members lose their conveniences: no travel outside Washington, no floor votes except on appropriations, no adjournment beyond 23 hours.

Read that list again. A shutdown would cost the legislators something, instead of costing the custodian everything.

Process reform is hard for the same reason spending bills are. A Joint Select Committee on Budget and Appropriations Process Reform drafted a two-year budget resolution, but reporting it needed separate majorities of each party’s appointees, and the vote was “one aye and seven noes” on one side.

How to read one before the vote

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Text scheduled for the House floor is posted at docs.house.gov, the Clerk’s repository, on the page of “legislation scheduled for consideration” that week. Each entry carries its own timestamp, so you can read the clock off the page. House rules set what that clock must reach: 72 hours for a committee report or a conference report, one legislative day for a special rule.

For the projects, find the earmark tables. House Rule XXI, clause 9(a) requires covered measures to arrive with “a list of congressional earmarks” and their sponsors, printed in the committee report or the Congressional Record first.

Then use the reporters’ method: take a published definition of what worries you, the way ProPublica took Congress’s definition of an earmark, and read the text against it.

The bill is public before the vote. Whether anyone reads it has never been a technical problem.