There is a happy medium. The big beautiful bill stuff is not normal. There are some states that have single issue clauses where the bill must be a single issue, resulting in more concise bills. Enforcement and rules can be made by agencies too. I think the whiplash is more of a two party thing since the bipartisan ones rarely flip-flop. The other stuff barely passes. We would still have whiplash even if implementation were left to another congress because it would still barely pass.
> We would still have whiplash even if implementation were left to another congress because it would still barely pass.
Not so, not if it were left to cross-party committees. By and large even the US system seems to have functional committees when you ignore a few grandstanders.
Unfortunately the US system seemingly tends towards creating massive legislation, partly because of the absence of this secondary legislation distinction, and partly because of the really interesting difference in the way it approaches opposition. In most of the world, if your bill passes with a huge majority, it's a good sign.
From my external perspective, it appears that in the USA, a bill passing with a huge majority is often seen as a significant failure, because opposition is so much more partisan and party loyalty battles so much more brutal, and the system so nearly two-party 50:50 deadlocked at all times, that if you get what you want with a huge majority, you weren't asking for enough.
So what tends to happen is that a bill starts off with a strong majority and then gets loaded down with extra, often tangentially-related detail, until it is juuuust going to squeak through.
The primary/secondary legislation approach tends to head off that possibility because secondary legislation that is genuinely unwieldy tends not to get out of committee. It also might be less vulnerable to lobbying, because the secondary legislation committees are small standing committees and handle more than one kind of secondary legislation, so lobbying influence tends to stick out a bit more.
"The primary/secondary legislation approach tends to head off that possibility because secondary legislation that is genuinely unwieldy tends not to get out of committee."
Cause and effect is off here. If the primary legislation we already have makes it out of committee to be loaded down after, then having secondary legislation would also be loaded down after. Splitting into two stages isn't the fix. Fixing the two party issues would still be necessary.
> If the primary legislation we already have makes it out of committee to be loaded down after
But it wouldn't be. I mean, you can't retrofit this onto the US system now anyway, but the primary/secondary split culturally leads to much, much smaller primary legislation.
Our system still produces bloated things like the UK tax code, but the general thrust of UK primary legislation is that it is absolutely small enough to be read fully and debated.
