Supplemental appropriations legislation can be a train wreck

OPINION:

There’s no telling how the train wreck that is the supplemental appropriations legislation will ultimately conclude, but it is not too early to take a few lessons from it.

First, and most importantly, this mayhem is the sort of thing that happens when you skip regular order. Had the supplemental legislation gone through the committee process, either as a single bill or in pieces, many of the issues that have complicated its journey would have been examined and discussed, votes would have been taken, and legislative text would have been adjusted.

We would not be litigating all of the issues associated with the supplemental: a general sentiment that while the struggle in Ukraine is worthwhile, it probably needs an endgame; reservations about Israeli intentions to use American taxpayer cash to kill innocent civilians; and, most importantly, a belief that the border of the United States should be more important to Congress than the borders of other nations.

Perhaps most importantly, the hundred or so Republicans in Congress who seem more interested in making sure Ukraine remains an American protectorate than they are in defending a southern border for the United States would have had ample opportunity to make that preference clear in committee votes. Voters would have known what their representatives are all about.

The committee process exists specifically to examine and address concerns and embed solutions to those concerns in legislation. When you skip it, as has been done here, you wind up trying to fix things at the last minute and on the fly. That is always messy and always produces durable hard feelings.

More ominously, skipping regular order means that members of Congress are able to hide their true preferences behind single yes or no votes for oversized legislation that addresses more than one issue. That’s why so many states require legislation to be single-issue — it minimizes the ability of representatives to weasel.

The simple reality is that the judgment of any small group of people, especially relatively homogeneous people, no matter how well intentioned or wise they are, will almost always be suboptimal compared with the wisdom of the larger group. That’s especially true about decisions involving conflicting sentiments and preferences.

Second, in any negotiation, leverage is the most important thing. In this instance, those in the Biden administration desperately want to ship cash to Ukraine. Irrespective of what they might say, they will sign off on anything that includes such cash. A more mercenary legislative approach would use that desire against them. Border security? Yep. FISA reform? Yep. Election integrity? Why not? The tricky part, however, is that leverage has value only if one uses it.

Finally, it is always tempting to make these mostly transactional moments into something more meaningful. Recently, someone in the Republican camp crossed that line and unfortunately suggested that history would judge members of Congress for this vote. Yikes.

I’m not clear who this “history” might be or what metric he or she might use to adjudge such a vote. But I’ve heard it often enough to know that it’s what legislators say right before they vote against the judgment and preferences of the voters.

The only ones judging any congressional action are the voters or, after we’re all dead, God. Whenever someone suggests that “history” judges votes on the House floor, all that usually means is that they have run out of legitimate reasons to vote for or against something and are trying to place one’s adversary on the fearsome “wrong” side of history. It’s the product of shoddy thinking, and it’s nonsense, which is why it is usually engaged in by the left not the right.

• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times and a co-host of the podcast “The Unregulated.”