comment: >
  
  The freedom caucus real agenda is the freedom to do nothing and the freedom to spread chaos across the country and pretend it’s not their fault
context: "Limit bills to a single subject" - Sounds great in principle, but there's only so many days in a legislative session and it's a big country with a lot that needs to be addressed. Splitting each subject into its own bill to go through the whole sausage factory would grind the process to a crawl.
  "Make it harder to waive the germaneness rule for amendments" - I like this one, though I imagine if waiving this rule is commonplace then it likely has to do with my first point that sometimes they need to squeeze something extra into a bill without going through the whole nine yards. Plus, who gets to be the arbiter of what's "germane"?
  "Expand the time between a bill’s introduction and its floor debate" - The giant bills everyone whines about get that size through endless haggling by the leadership, and probably don't contain nearly as many surprises as an opponent would have you believe. Even the 72 hour window they're asking for isn't going to be enough to read the phonebooks they'll generate, let alone parse its minutiae for legal implications, and in the end you're gonna vote the way the whip tells you to.
  "Eliminate proxy voting" - Yeah, this one ain't going anywhere, particularly when even the ones who whined about it find it incredibly useful. I like the idea of representatives having to physically be there to cast votes as a symbol of democracy, but in an age of instant communications there's really no need unless you plan on posturing for CSPAN.
  Something you'll notice about all of these points is that they slow down the legislative process considerably, forcing additional debate and procedure and other various time-wasting processes to take place before anything can get done. These aren't being proposed because their proponents believe in a more transparent and principled governance, but because they want to grind the process of government itself to a complete halt any time they feel like it. Making the government sclerotic and unable to respond to crises feeds their agenda and strengthens their argument that the federal government is a bureaucratic nightmare designed to turn taxpayer dollars into sludge and uselessness. And so of course we should de-fund it and give all the money to that nimble private sector and its invisible hand, which of course only has our best interests at heart.
  Take anything the Freedom Caucus proposes with a giant grain of salt and the worse possible interpretation, because that's what they're going to do with it.