According to the non-profit group Downsize DC, both houses of Congress have eliminated requirements that Representatives and Senators hear and/or read -- or even have full copies of -- legislation that they vote on. They have therefore submitted a bill entitled The Read the Bills Act and are trying to get a Congressman/-woman to introduce the bill.
They are having little success.
Now, much of the Downsize DC agenda seems to be taken from the Libertarian handbook, and I don't want to imply support for their agenda; but this piece of legislation seems pretty common-sensical to me. Is there any real objection to such requirements as a full verbatim reading of legislation before a quorum of each House? or a seven day waiting period between the final text of legislation and a vote thereon?
I'm asking real questions. If there are real problems with this bill, I'd like to know.
[Crossposted at The Good, the True, the Just.]
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Yes, there is a real problem with this. Major economic bills are thousands of pages long, and include tens of thousands of details. Requiring 538 members of Congress to read these bills would make passing them impossible. In fact, requiring that every bill has to be read by just one congressman (even the fastest reader in Congress) would bring the federal government to a standstill. It would be like requiring the Postmaster General to check every zip code on every piece of mail. Well, not quite that bad, but the idea is the same.
I would love to return to the days of a republic (rather than a democracy) where the members of congress were part-time congressmen with full-time jobs elsewhere. As recently as the 1920s, Congress met fairly rarely, and then adjourned for a long period (up to nearly a year). But since the 1930s, the Federal government has been running such a large portion of the economy that it's impossible for 538 human beings to actually oversee it. So these congressmen glue together bills from the contributions of their staff and thousands of members of the Executive Branch, and trust that any really horrible provisions can be repealed later (or overturned by the courts).
"Requiring 538 members of Congress to read these bills would make passing them impossible."
Then it's time to either pare back what Congress is doing or reorganize the government and be honest about how much control is where.
Perhaps the Congress should be voting for beuracrats who hobble together the details, rather than them.
And honestly, I'm presented with detailed legal documents all the time. Even if I don't read them, I'd expect to live by them. It would only take 1 Congress person simply saying that they won't vote for what they haven't read (their fiduciary responsibility) to bring changes to the system.
Amy wrote: Then it's time to either pare back what Congress is doing or reorganize the government and be honest about how much control is where.
I definitely agree.
Personally, I prefer the first option. The second option is already in force in many parts of the government. Typically, Congress creates a huge bureaucracy (e.g., the Department of Education), and then decrees that anything this department publishes in the Federal Register has the force of law. And the Federal Register is huge and nobody even tries to read it; bureaucrats simply learn the pages and paragraphs they need to cite for specific tasks.
I think the reason the Health Care bill is so huge is that in 1993 they tried the other method -- creating an unelected bureaucracy that could issue health care rules -- and it was massively unpopular. So this time they are pretending that the members of Congress are actually in charge of health care reform.
It's not just the size of bills that bothers me; it's the fact that our representatives and senators don't always even know what they're voting on. Amendments and riders are attached without being distributed.
I don't know how to solve the health care situation, but I can't imagine that a 1,000-page bill that not even Congress has been able to read in detail will help the situation.
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