Rapid House Funding of COVID-19 Emergency Legislation with the Representation Amendment

Political wrangling frustrates many voters and rarely more so than when political clashes delay emergency funding in response to a national emergency. You watch the news and see the Speaker of the House arguing with the President over how much to spend to assist American families furloughed due to the COVID-19 lockdowns and wonder why the two sides cannot simply split the difference and pass the bill. But nothing is that simple.

Spending originates in the House of Representatives, so the Speaker of the House holds the checkbook, but any bill passed by the House must also pass the Senate and be signed by the president. COVID-19 hit the United States at a time the Democrat party held the majority in the House of Representatives and the Republican party held the majority in the Senate and the presidency. News coverage of the negotiations conjure images of the Speaker of the House negotiating alternatively with the Senate majority leader and the president on the amount the federal government would spend to support families and businesses financially harmed by business disruptions related to COVID-19.

Why just the one bill?

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Have you noticed the entire argument centers around “the bill”? “The”, as in the only, bill under consideration. And therein lies the problem. A spending bill providing a check for each American household contains more than just legislation defining the formulas for the amounts of the checks. Companies or entire industries also get money from the government, as their bills keep coming despite little or no revenue. Charitable organizations may be given money to carry on their missions. But political allies are also winners in this spending binge. The question is, whose political allies? The political allies of the President, the Senate, or the Speaker of the House? Being so politically opposed, neither wants the political allies of the other to benefit or grow stronger. Stalemate results, and the American people grow more frustrated with the entire legislative process.

Legislation When We Need It

Visualize the process of passing an emergency relief bill when 10,000 people from districts evenly distributed across the nation each have free reign to submit, negotiate, and ultimately agree upon legislation. Using the legislative process described in the book, The Representation Amendment (Because we don’t have enough people in Congress and the people already there are the wrong ones), suppose half the members of the House each submit a bill detailing their response to the COVID-19 emergency. Five thousand bills hit the House ratings queue all at once. While most of the bills likely focus exclusively on funding families through the emergency, other bills include support for companies, industries, or charities.

Five thousand people will call upon their experiences in a variety of industries and with their favored charities to target federal financial assistance where the money does the greatest good. Some pork for political allies will of course be proposed. It is to be expected. But members of the House must merge the five thousand bills into one or more bills with the support of a majority of members. Can the Representation House do a better job than the Legacy House?

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Using the ratings system, the first pass weeds out many of the unworkable, unreasonable, and undesirable proposals. To get money into the hands of the American people quickly, members of the House propose bills containing no language except that authorizing the federal government to send a check to each American household. While many bills are proposed with a variety of formulas to calculate the amount the federal government will send to each household, consensus arrives quickly as members of the House follow the trend of proposed legislation.
The book details how bills enjoy a set period of time while members of the House rate them. However, members may see trends emerging from the flurry of bill submissions and offer revisions long before the conclusion of the ratings period of the previous wave of bill submissions. Inside of a few weeks, the bills submitted for ratings in the House begin to look very similar, and eventually one bill emerges containing language agreeable to most House members. That bill passes the House and goes to the Senate.

State Input Means Higher Quality Legislation

Ambassadors of the states sit in the Senate, and their perspective differs somewhat from that of the people. Senators have a decision to make at this point. Senators can trust members of the House to pass more bills helping companies, industries, and charities, and restrain their desires to mark up the bill. Quickly passing the bill gets cash in the hands of the American people sooner than if the House and Senate had to reconcile the original bill with the bill containing changes made by the Senate.

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Alternatively, the senators could mark up the bill to include money for the states, which are themselves facing revenue shortfalls. Senators could tack on financial relief for companies or industries suffering in their states. The Senate has this power and authority. However, to take these actions delays the delivery of checks to the American people.

Either way, the House members continue to propose legislation through the ratings system. Drawing on their life experiences, the ten thousand or so members of the House offer ideas how to keep entire industries from going bankrupt. Federal spending legislation originates in the House, and members of the House will surely get an ear-full from constituents and local businesses. Perhaps the House continues to pass small, targeted bills to assist one industry at a time or a consolidated bill gains enough support to pass.

The Senate may originate its own legislation, provided the legislation contains no new federal funding. Legislation the Senate proposed may include a loosening of regulations to ease the financial burdens on businesses or the states themselves.

In the summer of 2020, legislation to distribute a second round of stimulus checks stalled in the House. The bills the majority of House members would vote to pass would either be rejected by the Senate or vetoed by the President. As the two political parties battled over peripheral spending differences, the American people got nothing. I believe the American people would have been happier had the House delivered on the second stimulus check and the two parties fought it out over the other spending on their own time.

Congress without the Stalemates

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But Congress does not work that way. Today, the Democrats control the House and the Republicans control the Senate and the presidency. Don’t get hung up on today’s political party roles. If the roles were reversed, we likely would see the same outcome. The system is flawed, in that the system allows for these stalemates. The stimulus checks are the leverage that allows the party that holds the House to force the other party to accept its pork spending, also in the legislation. The party that controls the House makes the opposition party look like ogres for “blocking” the stimulus payments. People get angry at the opposing party for the role they play, and years later, when the roles are reversed, get angry at the opposing party for leveraging popular spending legislation using the same tactics their champions employed.

In the Representation House, if the people really want the pork spending or political payoffs, the people will get the pork spending or political payoffs. The legislation will pass on its own merits. But the pork spending or political payoffs in the Legacy House, the House we have today, only passes piggy-backed on legislation the American people want. The American people get everything or nothing. The Representation Amendment, combined with the system proposed in the book, The Representation Amendment (Because we don’t have enough people in Congress and the people already there are the wrong ones), gets the American people more of the legislation they want and less of the legislation they don’t.