Do you realize that a lot of things like this are introduced as riders to other bills rather than put into bills of their own? For example, there have been 67 pieces of legislation in the current congresss alone that sought to change the rules on abortion, often as a peripheral to the bill's primary purpose: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/subjects/abortion/5897

Well, you might say, people shouldn't legislate that way. But they do. And even if you don't follow every bill, it should be obvious to even a casual political observer that the 112th Congress has been especially contentious in this regard.