What is Congress hiding?

• Position: Federal spending bill, Cybersecurity Act of 2015 and H-2B visas

Legislators smuggled all kinds of questionable provisions into a last-minute, $1.1 trillion spending bill

EVERY FISCAL YEAR, the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 requires the House and Senate to enact 12 separate discretionary spending bills, one for each appropriations subcommittee (Agriculture, Defense, Homeland Security, and so on). They have failed to meet this minimum requirement since 1994.

When Republicans re-took the Senate in November 2014, thus ensuring GOP control over both houses of Congress, they vowed to change all that. "One of my challenges is to try to convince some of my members that passing an appropriations bill is a good thing, not a bad thing," incoming Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told The New York Times. "The Senate basically didn't do squat for years."

Continuing resolutions keep the federal government funded for short stints while politicians continue arguing about the appropriations bills they refuse to pass.

Yet squat is still the order of the day. While the unified Congress did manage for the first time in six years to pass a budget resolution--the also-required, nonbinding baseline blueprint from which the appropriations bills are supposed to be carved--the appropriations process once again devolved into an ungainly, unreadable, last-minute mess of legislation called the omnibus. Clocking in at $1.1 trillion for Fiscal Year 2016, and stuffed with bills that even the relevant committee chairs had no idea were going in (see "The Last Honest Man in Congress," page 32), the best thing that can be said about the omnibus was that at least it wasn't another continuing resolution.

Continuing resolutions (or C.R.s, as they are known in D.C.), keep the federal government funded for short stints while politicians continue arguing about the appropriations bills they refuse to pass. In practice, they increase the frequency of can't-miss deadlines--and, during periods when Congress is divided, round-the-clock headlines--after which money for all "nonessential" purposes runs out.

That hypothetical was realized on October 1, 2013, when a cutoff to appropriate funds for the next fiscal year came and went without even the band-aid of a continuing resolution. House Republicans had passed a package that purposefully did not include money for the Affordable Care Act. President Barack Obama and the Democrat-led Senate refused to consider the bill. For 16 days the government went into power-saver mode, until a heavily criticized GOP gave in and passed a C.R. that funded Obamacare.

Since that moment, Republicans--particularly their new House Speaker, Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)--have preferred that their white-knuckled deadlines come less frequently, and without the noisy arguments over a shutdown. In October, as Ryan was on the verge of taking the gavel from John Boehner (R-Ohio), the House passed a two-year budget deal to increase federal spending by $80 billion, remove the 2013 sequestration caps on military spending, and suspend the debt limit until March 2017. In one fell swoop, the comparative fiscal discipline imposed during the divided-Congress era of 2011-2014 was discarded. The main drama left was seeing how exactly lawmakers would divide up the spoils.

Omnibus packages, which combine at least two and usually more individual spending bills, offer several advantages to members of Congress at the direct expense of their constituents. By combining so many disparate elements into one big legislative glop, representatives leave a much smaller paper trail against which they might be held accountable for their votes. By coming in a must-pass rush, the packages become ripe for gaudy earmarks and tailor-made rule-changes benefiting favored interests. In the eyes of the political press, the up-or-down vote becomes a referendum on legislative responsibility where the only wrong answer is no.

The 2,009-page omnibus (along with an extra 233 pages of tax extenders) for Fiscal 2016 was introduced on December 16, passed by both chambers on December 18 (316-113 in the House, 65-33 in the Senate), then signed into law later that day...