Omnibus Bill Is One That Contains Several

Omnibus bill is one that contains several separate but related items. This is in contrast with a regular bill that typically will only address a single issue. The reason for the attempt to pass an omnibus bill is to pass a package of reforms on a particular issue, such as a spending omnibus bill. An omnibus bill can help to speed up the legislative process by avoiding multiple votes on fairly minor issues.

If the issue is major, there might be other reasons for the pace of an omnibus bill, such as the need to enter into war. Omnibus bills are not used to circumvent the normal Congressional processes, but they do accelerate the process. Members of Congress are not forced to consider each issue individually, as is normally the case. For example, with the gun control proposals of the past week, there were several different bills on the table, each of which needed to be considered independently.

In that case, legislators may have felt that an omnibus bill would have been difficult to pass, so sought to pass individual components separately. However, an omnibus bill can be used when wholesale, dramatic changes are required. When dealing with a particular issue requires several different actions, each distinct from one another, an omnibus bill can help achieve the goal of having all of those issues passed at once, rather than being subject to piecemeal debate. Omnibus bills are not common in the United States.

One recent example of an omnibus bill comes from Florida, where an omnibus bill was used to pass a number of different changes affecting the insurance industry, and especially its customers. The article (Rohrer, 2013) highlights the fact that there were specific elements of the bill that concerned lawmakers. This is the hazard of omnibus bills. While the bill passed overwhelmingly, and with bipartisan support, some elements within the bill were contentious. These elements were not sufficiently contentious to avert the bill's passage.

The tactic with the omnibus bill here appears to be to use omnibus as a way to circumvent debate on the more contentious elements of the bill. By packaging some unwanted or negative reforms with ones that are needed. It is clear that from the opposition to particular elements of this bill, that those elements might not have passed had they been subject to debate and an individual vote.

The omnibus bill was a means of getting those controversial measures passed, since the bill overall was considered to be widely desirable. Sometimes, circumventing debate is a great way to a get a bad bill passed. Consider the recent Kansas omnibus bill HB 2253, which passes a number of measures concerning women's rights. The bill was passed through a state House committee and will head for a vote.

Even the bill's supporters do not have any real sense of the impact of the bill (Marty, 2013), which is precisely why such bills should be put up for debate. The omnibus tactic allows for a complex issue to be distilled into simplistic terms, because the bill must either be accepted or rejected wholesale. In this sense, the use of omnibus is not an honest tactic but is merely being leveraged to ram through a sloppy piece of legislation.

Ideally, the benefits of the omnibus bill in its ability to pass wide-ranging reforms quickly is that delays.