Let’s be less comprehensive

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid kept trying early last week to get the comprehensive financial reform bill put on the floor for debate.

Republicans kept imposing their minority to invoke a filibuster to keep yet another massive piece of legislation from even being considered.

Republicans said they were acting this way because there were provisions within the bill's hundreds of pages that worried them. They said deferring debate on the bill for a few days allowed them time to work privately with Democrats to get these differences smoothed out.

Republicans wanted to attach something to the bill to call their own before they confronted the politically inevitable: They simply must join Democrats eventually in doing something that appears to put reins on the abuse of Wall Street.

Then they relented. The Democrats had them boxed.

Thus, in this one case, one of the broken pieces of our modern legislative system -- that being the horrid abuse of the Senate filibuster in place of real and open debate with amendments proposed, after which a majority would rule because elections have consequences -- was averted.

But that's hardly the only broken piece.

There's also this modern insistence on vast "comprehensive" bills comprising hundreds of pages -- on health care, finance, energy and immigration -- that serves mostly to give opponents plenty of places to find excuses, or good reasons, to oppose bills and stymie productivity.

Why not try, instead, to break these tomes into smaller bills and get the parts enacted one by one, thus keeping the public policy ball rolling even as stalemates exist elsewhere?

These vast single measures have become preferred, in part, for two rather cynical reasons: You can buy a broader base of provincial backing by covering more matters in a large single bill (like Ben Nelson's subsidy for Nebraska), and your spin doctors can better design a message if doing so for one bill rather than several.

It's easier to sell "let's clean up Wall Street" than to say we need to establish public exchanges with clearinghouses for derivatives except in the case of commodities producers who are end users in bilateral contracts designed to hedge long-term costs.

This reliance on single massive bills also happens to be undemocratic. These big bills cover so much territory that they must be referred to more than one committee.

Then, once they've cleared all the committees, they differ. So the majority leader single-handedly decides how to resolve conflicts.

To be fair, some of this reliance on single comprehensive bills is based on essential policy or practicality.

So much of health care reform was intertwined that you would have done more harm than good if you'd passed one part and not another.

And the famously deliberative Senate's rules on time required for debate could mean that, if you broke a comprehensive bill into a dozen individual bills, you'd be required to spend 12 times as long.

As it happened, though, the Senate took forever on the single health care bill.

Time saved on the vacuum of filibusters against vast bills might be time used for actual debate and disposition of smaller bills.

In the current case, it seems entirely logical that the pursuit of responsible public policy in the broad field of financial regulation would be better served if, instead of a single comprehensive bill encompassing all the complexities of high finance, Congress would consider a bill on derivatives, and another on consumer protection, and another on investment banking, and another on community banking, and another on whether and how to facilitate the liquidation, or bailing out, of institutions too big too fail.

The treatise in this space last week about how everything in America is too big and consolidated these days -- it goes for our bills in Congress, too.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.