Paranormal Legislative Activity?

Posted by Jim Harper

Here’s an entertaining and timely video from the Sunlight Foundation:

Readthebill.org is where you can learn more about H. Res. 554.

Have a transparent Halloween everybody!

Tuesday Links

Posted by Chris Moody

  • Dear members of Congress: If you’re not going to read the bills you pass,  at least read the Constitution. Don’t fret; it’s short and written in plain English.
  • NYC: “The city that never smokes.” A proposal to ban lighting up in New York’s parks has exposed the puritanical agenda behind the crusade against smoking.
  • Tyler Cowen: With health care costs high and rising, government mandates to buy insurance would make many people worse off.

“Read the Bill” = Deliberative Process, Please

Posted by Jim Harper

The debate about whether members of Congress and senators should read bills has been getting highly literal lately. It’s capped off by Angie Drobnic Holan’s article, “Speed-Reading the Health Care Reform Bill?, on Politifact (a St. Petersburg Times site) this morning.

Faced with a 1,000-or-so-page health care reform proposal, “a person could conquer the bill in seven to 13 hours.”

There you have it! That’s what it takes if you want ‘em to read the bill!

Of course, the “read-the-bill” concept is a stand-in for others:

One is simply having a more deliberative process in Congress. It’s dawning on the American public that bad things happen when Congress operates in haste—the derivatives debacle, for example. Oh, and also, government takeovers. Oh yeah, and spending orgies.

But “read the bill” is also about power.

“Waiting periods . . . tend to disperse power to people who might otherwise be at the margins of the debate,” reports Holan. “Centrist Democrats in the Senate, for example, have asked for waiting periods after amendments and conference reports.”

It goes beyond that, too. Letting the public read finalized bills before they become law allows the public to second-guess Washington, D.C. and transfers power back home. People want to use the Internet to have more say in governance.

And there is far more knowledge, sense, and brain-power out there in the land than on Capitol Hill (I say as a former legislative staffer). Given a regular process for doing so, the people (and lawyers) faced with implementing proposed federal laws would examine and critique proposals in Congress much more than they do now. This would help improve results, though Members of Congress would surely chafe at being overseen by the lowly public.

Speaking of waiting periods, recall that President Obama promised to post the bills coming out of Congress for five days before he signs them. Let’s take a look at how he’s done with this promise so far: Read the rest of this post »

Carper: We Trust Our Staff So You Can Trust Us

Posted by Jim Harper

A deep fissure between federal lawmaking practices and the Internet-fueled expectations of the people is just starting to open.

Here’s a fascinating interview with Senator Tom Carper (D-DE), in which he justifies not reading the legislation that he votes on.

He’s right that the bills Congress passes are almost incomprehensible, but he draws the wrong conclusion from it. It’s not OK to pass bills that you can’t read and literally don’t understand.

Congress and the bureaucracy will come to learn a lesson that other parts of our society have learned: The Internet changes things.

Because it is now possible to see legislation before Congress passes it, Americans now expect to see legislation before it passes. And they will come to expect that their representative understand it—in detail.

A machine has grown up in Washington over the past two hundred years where representatives rely on colleagues who rely on staff to write bills. This has not produced a desirable body of federal law, and it is not a process that the public will accept for much longer.