Omnibus

Julian Sanchez has a great, link-rich piece at Reason about the opacity of federal legislating, particularly the imposingly named omnibus spending bill. Last paragraph:

One measure that could help would be a kind of legislative cooling-off period, some minimum period of time (a week?) that a bill may be debated, or at least read, between the time it leaves committee in final form and the time it can be put to a vote. These days, we wouldn't even need Reagan's legion of 300 at OMB. The same distributed, pajama-clad legions who pounced with such alacrity upon the suspicious kerning of Dan Rather's bogus memos could locate wasteful (or, as in this case, privacy-invading) provisions—and here's the novel part—before they were locked into law. It's a safety measure so simple, obvious, and likely to be effective that there's no need to worry about its ever being implemented.