The Read the Bills Act
I recently came across an interesting piece of legislation. The Read the Bills Act would require new bills to be read, in their entirety before a quorum in both the House and the Senate before being voting.
In my opinion, this would solve a couple of problems. Firstly, It would help stop pork barreling, or tacking extraneous things onto laws to get things passed without proper discussion. Second, it would help to make bills easier to understand. Let's face it, if you have to listen to a bill being read, you aren't going to fill it with legalese. And finally, it would help the public to be better informed about what is going on in congress by requiring that all bills be posted online 24 hours before they can have a vote.
4 comments:
Honestly, this would probably never work. First, I could see half the congress asleep, fidgeting or going to the bathroom every five minutes to keep their politically honed ADHD alive. Second, laws aren't written in a way that make for easy reading; laws are dense, wordy & bloated documents that are hard to interpret even after being written. It doesn't help that the president has signing statements either. In order for this to work, the language has to be made clear & concise. I always get a kick out of some congress person who says 'well, the law is _basically_ X'. If we had a law for clear & concise legal writing FIRST, then this law SECOND, we'd be well off. Frankly, with the people who are elected these days, I'm concerned that they're even literate, let alone able to understand the weasel-wordings of these bills. All this aside, have you ever watched C-SPAN? Most of the time no one is even on the floor, aside from staffers.
Exactly. The idea is that forcing the congress(wo)men (congresspeople just doesn't sound right) to read the bills would get them to make them less complicated and long in the first place. Of course, if this should get passed, and they choose not to make the bills easier to understand and shorter, it's their loss.
(same anonymous) I doubt this would ever pass; The only thing Congress votes to do for themselves is to raise their pay via 'Cost of living' increases. What would probably happen is the same thing that happened with the ethics reform, which is effectively nothing. The final law would probably have a provision that if a certain percentage of law makers (better than congresspeople? ;-) voted to, the reading would be skipped; I could even see this vote becoming the norm before reading even began. Besides which, it still wouldn't force a single law maker to comprehend what they were doing, and given arguments like 'series of tubes' and wonderful names like USAPATRIOT (who'd really want to vote against that?) I doubt this would actually fix the problem. Honestly, I think we're starting to wane in political/democratic growth, will eventually restructure, for better or for worse (probably the latter rather than the former).
Well, the solution that I've heard people suggest every time I mention this is just to slip it on the end of another bill titled something like the "Save the Children Act" and let the fact that they don't read the bills work in our favor.
But yeah, it is incredibly unlikely that law makers would pass this bill if they actually understood it. That doesn't make it a good piece of legislation and maybe if enough people knew about it, they would be forced to pass it.
Hey, we can always dream, right? :)
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