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Congressman Bill Posey introduced a bill to change the rules of the House to prevent two or more unrelated issues from being incorporated into one single bill. The resolution requires that different issues be voted on separately by the House to end the practice of poisoning good legislation for political purposes or sneaking through ideas that don’t have majority support.

“Legislation is complicated enough as it is and there’s no reason to make it worse by adding in amendments that have nothing to do with the topic we’re voting on,” said Congressman Posey. “If our ideas have merit we should let them stand on their own merit and be considered in their own right. I think it adds more transparency to the legislative process. Most state legislatures across this country operate under this single issue practice and it has served them well.”

Specifically, Posey’s resolution provides for a “division of the question” based on the legislative proposals contained within the bill. Simply put, under the Posey bill if the Congress merges two unrelated bills then when it comes to vote in the Congress, each of those separate issues must be voted on separately. Currently, House rules allow a Member to call for a “division of the question” when the bill contains separate legislative proposals and is grammatically divisible. In practice, this leads to separate legislative propositions being linked by carefully constructed sentences that can further complicate and confuse the underlying legislation. Posey said the Florida State Legislature has a similar rule to prevent bad legislation from being slipped into must-pass legislation.