The old "read the bill" catchphrase seems to be rearing its head again.
There is a movement afoot to put full copies of Congressional bills online three days before they are acted upon.
The ideas will seemingly help average citizens see what their representative are voting on. It evolved from a lot of anger aimed at the passage of the health care reform bill, that was 2,000 or 3,000 pages long, and news reports, that members of Congress hadn't read the bill.
Putting full text of a bill online might be helpful for lawyers and lobbyists who will know important phrases and subparagraphs to pay attention to, but it will not help average citizens trying to understand what their members are voting on.
I know. I've tried to read legislative bills. They're a mess of complication and confusion. You'll find yourself looking up words,and their legal meaning.
You'll find yourself going back and forth through hundreds of pages trying to find "subdivision c" of Section 4351, subsection (d) as it relates to Section 4352, subsection (f), paragraph (i).
Trust me. You don't want to read the bills these guys put together. In fact, in my view, putting the full bills on line before they are voted on, gives the lobbyists the advantage over regular people.
What Congress should require is a clear summary, written in plain English, to be posted before the bill is finalized.
That actually is available in most cases, if you go to the Library of Congress website http://thomas.loc.gov. You can search by bill number of common title or key word, and find the status and usually a nice summary written by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
Actually, the Thomas website already has full text of bills, and earlier versions and later versions, online already. A separate website would in my mind be duplicative.
It takes tons of time and expertise to get anything out of the legalese in these bills. We "hire" members of Congress and their staff to understand this stuff for us and communicate it in a way we understand.
That's there job. Not mine.
And if I'm in the dark, they'll hear about it.
But please, don't make me read the bill.
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"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so volumnuous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed of revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little know, and less fixed?"
ReplyDelete-- James Madison
Seems the problem is not that the laws will be put on display before they are offered as legislation, but rather the laws are simply too long to read and after these laws are passed, they are enhanced, expanded, interpreted and complicated by regulatory agencies.
The purpose for writing such laws containing thousands of pages, tens of thousands of words, that refer to legislation passed decades or centuries ago is to leave them open so that one day an unelected judge can decide what the law means for everyone.
Can we at least agree that this is not a measure of limited government, but that of a government which presumes it limits on power have no bounds?
I think you are misplacing your ire in this matter. The problem is the size of the bills that John Kerry readily admits he doesn't even bother to read. We really don't have much of a standard for our elected officials, do we?