> Make a constitutional amendment saying no bill can be more than 15 pages and I guarantee you countless problems will go away.
Then no bill would pass.
The default for a congress man/woman is to say no. The reason bills are so long is that if you want me to vote yes to your bill then I get to write 2 pages into your bill giving me what I want.
Take a 10 page bill get 100 votes and you've got a 210 page bill that has a chance of passing.
With a law that says no bill can be more than 15 pages you'd never get it passed unless everyone agreed to vote for everyone else's pet bill, then instead of one monster bill, you've got 100 small bills which is arguably worse off as it means you've got to kill many smaller bills rather than being able to kill one larger bill.
I would say that what you describe is a MUCH better situation. If you have 100 small bills rolled into one, it's easier for representatives to say "I voted for this part, not that," or even, "I didn't see that part of the bill." With many smaller bills, it makes the tit-for-tat more explicit.
Representatives could still trade votes if they wanted, but we would have more visibility into the process. What's bad about that?
My thinking was that the time to pass a bill would still remain about the same, regardless of size. This means that we wouldn't see as many little bills passed as large bills.
I get your point about smaller bills providing better transparency. That's a very good side effect of smaller bills!
Not sure we'd see fewer bills passed; the cognitive load for each one would be smaller, so maybe they could work faster.
Anyway, "fewer bills passed" could be a good thing, depending on your perspective. The job of Congress isn't to pass as many bills as possible any more than the job of programmers is to write as many lines of code as possible. Less output may be better.
Then no bill would pass.
The default for a congress man/woman is to say no. The reason bills are so long is that if you want me to vote yes to your bill then I get to write 2 pages into your bill giving me what I want.
Take a 10 page bill get 100 votes and you've got a 210 page bill that has a chance of passing.
With a law that says no bill can be more than 15 pages you'd never get it passed unless everyone agreed to vote for everyone else's pet bill, then instead of one monster bill, you've got 100 small bills which is arguably worse off as it means you've got to kill many smaller bills rather than being able to kill one larger bill.