THE BUNDLES ARE TOO DARNED BIG.

Over the weekend, Utah Senator Mike Lee, a Republican, explained why he would not vote for the latest bundle, er, "supplemental appropriation."

The reporter immediately understood that my frustration was not directed at her.

Rather, it was directed at the Law Firm of Schumer & McConnell (“The Firm^TM”), which is perpetually trying to normalize a corrupt approach to legislating—in which The Firm^TM

(1) spends months drafting legislation in complete secrecy,

(2) aggressively markets that legislation based not on its details and practical implications (good and bad), but only on its broadest, least-controversial objectives,

(3) lets members see bill text for the first time only a few days (sometimes a few hours) before an arbitrary deadline imposed by The Firm^TM itself, always with a contrived sense of urgency, and then

(4) forces a vote on the legislation on or before that deadline, denying senators any real opportunity to read, digest, and debate the measure on its merits, much less introduce, consider, and vote on amendments to fix any perceived problems with the bill or otherwise improve it.

Whenever The Firm^TM engages in this practice, it largely excludes nearly every senator from the constitutionally prescribed process in which all senators are supposed to participate.

By so doing, The Firm^TM effectively disenfranchises hundreds of millions of Americans—at least for purposes relevant to the legislation at hand—and that’s tragic.

As of this afternoon's posting, that bill, which at about 350 pages, was short enough for people familiar with the drafting conventions and the law to go through it and identify all the things wrong with it, has failed for lack of enthusiasm.  Power Line's Scott Johnson saw the failure in the haste with which this thing was rushed to a vote.  "One might hazard the guess that is because the closer we look the worse it gets."

I'm with the senator in objecting to the sort of bundling that Official Washington engages in with such legislation, with some sort of immigration reform bundled with more money for nation-building wars this time, which must be passed pronto.  "The border is not secure, and attempts by Congressional leadership to act on securing the border are rebuffed with deflections that Ukraine, or perhaps Palestine (the one on the Mediterranean, not to be confused with the one in Texas or East Palestine in Ohio) come first.  So many messes, so important it is that we have another omnibus bill."

The senator is not a fan either of the approach, or the usual Official Washington dramatics that accompany its passage, often under threat of a debt ceiling deadline or government shutdown or some other totally avoidable procedural jam.

Every time The Firm^TM utilizes this approach and the bill passes—and it nearly always does—The Firm^TM becomes more powerful.

The high success rate is largely attributable to the fact that The Firm^TM has become very adept at (a) enlisting the help of the (freakishly cooperative) news media, (b) exerting peer pressure in a way that makes what you experienced in middle school look mild by comparison, and (c) rewarding those who consistently vote with The Firm^TM with various privileges that The Firm^TM is uniquely capable of offering (committee assignments, help with campaign fundraising, and a whole host of other widely coveted things that The FirmTM is free to distribute in any manner it pleases).

It’s through this process that The Firm^TM passes most major spending legislation.

Instructively, people writing from a variety of perspectives don't like the bundle, because there's too much sand in the ice cream sundae.  Red State's Mike Miller notes,  "When we reach a point in this country — we're already there — where the Democrat Party reduces the security of the United States to a political give-and-take, in which it (and its president) claims they will secure the southern border in exchange for Republican votes to send an additional $60 billion to Ukraine for their never-ending war with Russia, we're looking over the cliff."

Intercept contributor Ryan Grim, taking a different perspective, sees the National Security State getting what it wants, to the disadvantage of the various protest communities.

“Comprehensive immigration reform” used to mean Republicans would get some enforcement and border provisions and Democrats would get a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented.

Now it means Republicans get all that but Democrats instead get money for the war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the Never Enough Dependents cheering section at Common Dreams isn't cheering today.  "Even if the bill ultimately doesn't become law, observers warned that the Senate deal could do lasting damage to efforts to create a humane immigration system."

That's rich, considering that the Jarrett regency, whose continuation the Common Dreams types prefer to a Trumpian Restoration, has been making immigration inhumane for the past three years.  Victoria Taft of Pajamas Media elaborates.

I have long believed that the United States should increase the number of legal immigrants allowed into the country per year. Right now, one million non-citizens are legally allowed to call America home. But we should allow people into the country based on our needs as a nation and a person's willingness to learn the language and customs and to be an American. Biden doesn't even care about that. He's literally flooding the zone with a number of strangers that represent the size of a military division each day. Many of those people are commanded by cartels.

Yes, and as Scott Johnson continues, it's amusing of Dementia Joe to now promise to close the border when he created the mess in the first place.

President Biden promptly released a statement supporting the bill. This from the man who created the “emergency” that the bill allegedly mitigates: “If you believe, as I do, that we must secure the border now, doing nothing is not an option.”

If Biden believes that the border must be secured, one wonders why he garishly opened it on the first day of his administration. One wonders why he doesn’t do a goddamn thing about it right now. Jeffrey Anderson explains the Biden plan in the City Journal column “Border crisis by design.”

Mr Anderson's explanation is straightforward.

The cause of the current crisis is President Joe Biden’s unprecedented refusal to enforce federal immigration law, which requires that all asylum-seekers be detained rather than released into the United States. The solution, therefore, is for Biden to start enforcing federal law as he is constitutionally required to do—or for Congress to deny the president something else he wants until he does.

That article speculates about "equity" considerations behind the lax enforcement; and that will likely make its way into more loose talk about importing Democrat voters, which continues to annoy me, although this post has become too long already.  I repeat my policy suggestion, which probably doesn't take five hundred pages of marked up legislative language to achieve.  "Yes, the current process is disorder. Simplify. Work permits now. Student visas now. Citizenship petitions in five years. Immigration lawyers and pundits benefit by the current system; employers, whether of graduate assistants, farm implement operators, professors, or bowl balancers, get jacked around."