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Notes -
Should I be concerned that this spending bill is too long for anyone to realistically read it before voting on it? Even if that's the norm, it still sounds like a bad thing.
It's certainly not a good thing but it's not as bad as it may seem at first glance. A lot of the content in the bill won't be new material to the people voting on it. Part of the reason the bill gets so long is because Congress takes a bunch of other bills introduced throughout the year and append them to the appropriations bill. So in addition to funding the government this bill also contains reform of the Electoral Count Act and a bunch of other stuff not related to funding the government.
It would be better if we could just vote on all these bills themselves but various things prevent that. Part of that is that there is little bipartisan agreement on individual bills which means, with the way the Senate works, only the rare bills with large support in both parties can pass. This is also why there's such a focus on the contours of reconciliation, since those bills can bypass the Senate hurdles. Another part is that there's little trust (for good reason) between the two parties (or even factions within the parties) that they will keep their word on deals for voting for different bills. There's always a concern with enforcement of a deal like "If we vote for and pass bill X, I'll vote for and help pass bill Y." After X is passed you can just not vote on Y, after all. This is also why the end of the year omnibus is so controversial. The funding bill carries a very large downside (government shutdown) in the event it doesn't pass, so both parties load it up with as much as they can before it becomes impassable. Since the whole thing passes as a single package, with a large negative for voting against, it's basically the only time the parties can make some kind of enforceable deal.
I have to wonder, are we the only country that uses the act of funding the government to try and get laws passed at the same time? Surely they don't do this in other countries--I wouldn't be surprised if they even have laws against it! Granted, I guess "shutting down the federal government" is met with a shrug of the shoulders in other countries compared to here (for example, I visited Spain at a time where there was apparently no government formed).
I am not aware of any others, but I'm also not aware of any other legislative body that has anything like the cloture rule in the US Senate (requiring a larger proportion of votes in the body to end debate on a bill and proceed to a vote to pass it than is required to actually pass it). If the Senate didn't have its particular cloture rule it would be unnecessary to tie so many bills making substantive policy changes to a spending bill, because they could just be passed through ordinary business instead.
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