Commentary Habits matter. Good ones can help us by standardizing useful behaviours, but others can hurt by entrenching practices we possibly shouldn’t be doing. And ask any nail-biter how easy it is to break a habit. While some habits are annoying to us personally, others carry heavier implications. They can harm our public life. When governments, for example, decide it’s to their advantage to package multiple pieces of diverse legislation in one large bill, an omnibus bill, they set precedents that become habitual in succeeding administrations. We know that omnibus bills are anti-democratic, because the purpose of debate in legislatures is to discuss the value of specific ideas before they are made into law. That time-honoured tradition is short-circuited in omnibus bills, which contain so many new rules on such varying topics that debate about each is impossible. Even the name is a sly piece of trickery. We’ve all seen …