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...
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.…
