[yardie]

Not sure if you are aware but we rarely directly get to vote on these things. You vote for a representative and hope they vote in a way that serves your interests. But now, we have omnibus bills. And it's 50/50 loaded with things we want and things we don't. The same bill that funds Pre-K will also have a section to fund a kitten shredding machine. But if you vote against it all voters will hear is how you don't want to fund education.

[realo]

I do not live in the USA, but my understanding of those omnibus bills is that they are government blackmail of its people.

I remember being horrified the first time I heard this was legal in the USA.

How can the US citizens accept such a brutal denying of good governance is beyond me.

[thephyber]

The omnibus bills aren’t blackmail, as much as a symptom of the failure of Congress to be able to do what it is supposed to: debate.

There is 1 funding bill per year which only requires a 50% vote instead of a 60% / 67% to pass that all other spending bills require.

Every member with a goal tries to attach it to the big annual funding bill. The bill becomes so large that nobody likes the bill as a whole, but everybody has something in it they will defend.

And the old filtering process (committees which recommend the content of bills) are dominated by majority party leadership. This is maybe the closest symptom to blackmail.

[runarberg]

I‘m not (yet) a citizen of the USA, but I’ve lived there for a while. As I understand it, there is hardly any political opposition in this country. I would actually describe it as a controlled opposition. A lot of people here tend to think the only role of the opposition is to run the right candidate and win the next election. As such, there is no real resistance when the majority government oversteps their boundaries.

To make matters worse, labor unions are equally politically inactive, and most often their only political moves are endorsing candidates. When they do voice support for or opposition against bills, those bills are often stuff related to their industry, and seldom do they actually oppose an over reaching government by threatening general strikes etc.

The press here is also very right leaning. All the big media are owned by capitalist conglomerates and as such most people never hear real challenges to the capitalist power structure. As long as the government class acts favorable to the capitalist interest, then the press has aligning interest, and is thus heavily incentivized to never challenge the government to much.

[mothballed]

IIRC FDR pioneered the contemporary use of this to ram through progressive legislation, in particular social security by essentially packaging it up so the needy would get nothing in other programs if social security wasn't passed.

Though I wouldn't be surprised if the idea goes back to Roman times.

[cyberge99]

It wouldn’t have mattered because the Horowitz Foundation donated them to avoid governance and regulations.