Rep. Conyers: "What good is reading the bill...?"

[Grunthos]

You couldn't make this shit up... a congressman, head of the judiciary committee in fact, asks what good it does him to actually read a bill before he helps it become law that we citizens must thereafter conform to.

CNSNews.com
Conyers Sees No Point in Members Reading 1,000-Page Health Care Bill--Unless They Have 2 Lawyers to Interpret It for Them
Monday, July 27, 2009
By Nicholas Ballasy, Video Reporter



(CNSNews.com) - During his speech at a National Press Club luncheon, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), questioned the point of lawmakers reading the health care bill.


“I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill,’” said Conyers.


“What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

:wallbash::vertag::butcher:

Video of this dullard at the link.

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=51610&print=on

[Dr. L]

...

http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m128/Dr_Larkin/john_eccleston_03.jpg





Even Dominar Rygel the sixteenth, who lives billions upon billions of lightyears away, got struck by the stupidity of this.


Seriously... what the hell. Is our entire government a joke? Bozo's revenge?

Might as well round off the top and sides of the Washington Monument, we're being run by dildos.

I refuse to dignify them with civility any further. Dipshits. Phalluses. Blast-ended skanks and Floppy-wanded Dementor buggerors.

They all say they're avoiding "Politics as usual". Correct. Because doing that would mean they were doing their jobs, which they are not. Dingbats.

Barbara Streisands.

[Shady]

“What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

He's right. Let's set it on fire!

[dooge1992]

He's kind of right, but that's what committee is for. Most of the reps don't read a bill unless their committee is the one reviewing it. Kind of why so many extra things are added just before the vote.

[Shady]

Most of the reps don't read a bill...

You coulda stopped right there. We all know what you mean.

[Grunthos]

And that's why the silly bastards don't even know what it is they are voting for.

[Tonus]

The truth of the matter is mind-boggling in its stupidity. It's inexcusable, and yet... read it and weep. (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/26846.html)

(Note that I am quoting most of the article but not the entire text, which can be read by following the link.)


Across the country, “Read the bill!” has become a rallying cry of the health care debate.

People are shouting it at town halls. Local newspapers teem with editorials and readers’ letters demanding that lawmakers do it. Bloggers and their commenters say the same. Politicians of both parties are taunting their foes across the aisle with it.

But reading actual legislative text is often the least productive way to learn what’s actually in a bill.

Consider the House health care bill (or bills, as it were). The 1,017-page text is a tangle of references to other clauses, sections and subsections of the bill as well as numerous other statutes — some passed ages ago, all a pain to locate and search, even online: “Section 1179 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1320d-8) is amended” by striking this and inserting that, or “the tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as a tax imposed by this chapter for the purposes of determining the amount of any credit under this chapter or for the purposes of section 55.”

Got that?

“These bills are not written for even the educated layperson. They are written for specialists,” said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers.

Even legislative staffers who deal with an issue every day can miss or fail to grasp the consequence of small turns of legislative language. “The legislative process is made up of people who are artisans at being able to craft language that looks innocuous” but isn’t, said Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who spent more than three decades as a high-level staffer on Capitol Hill.

...

And however naive the call for members to read each and every bill sounds, it touches on what congressional observers across the political spectrum say is a very real and very dangerous trend.

Lawmakers, with troubling frequency, are voting on bills before there’s time for anyone — including individual members — to vet them.

...

But if reading the bill isn’t practical — or wouldn’t help anyway — what’s a member to do?

There’s a whole advisory and consultative system built into the legislative process designed to help members understand legislation, said Thomas Mann, a congressional expert with the Brookings Institution.

Lawmakers, committees and caucus leaders all employ staffs of legislative and policy experts to brief members and write plain-English summaries. There are also specialized departments, such as the Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget Office, that offer a variety of nonpartisan, expert services. Plus, a slew of think tanks and advocacy groups provide their own analyses.

Rather than asking if lawmakers are reading bills, Mann said, “the more critical questions are: Is someone reading it? Is it available in a timely way, [or] are things being written at the last minute, in the dark, with no one really aware of what’s been included?”

In other words, the advisory process needs time to work.

...

The problem with underinformed votes on fast-moving legislation didn’t begin with the Democratic takeover in 2006, as even Republican analysts acknowledge. The PATRIOT Act flew through Congress so quickly in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks that members were still learning of the ramification years later. And it took months to digest all that was in the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill after it passed — including the true cost, which the Bush administration concealed from Congress.

From his days on the Hill in the mid-’90s, Lilly can recall working to put together omnibus appropriations bills in the early hours of the morning — only to have staffers for then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-N.D.) walking in with whole additional sections to insert into the bill.

“I mean, just sort of a grab bag of stuff that they just threw in there,” Lilly said.

But the bipartisan history of moving too fast hasn’t stopped Democrats from taking heat for passing bills too quickly — or given Republicans pause about criticizing the other side.

...

The Sunlight Foundation’s Read the Bill campaign is focused on requiring Congress to post all nonemergency legislation online for 72 hours before debate begins — and not necessarily, as the name might suggest, advocating members read legislative text.

“In many ways, it’s more about the people and citizens’ access to reading the bill than it is about legislators reading the bill — which we think they should do,” Brewer said.

A 72-hour window would ensure that interested voters as well as advocacy groups could weigh in while they still have a chance to influence their representatives’ decisions, Brewer said.

What’s more, that time would also give staff and outside groups the time to scrub legislation and explain what’s actually in it to the rest of the world — a crucial step, say policy experts.

“The American public have a reasonable right to expect a higher level of diligence on the part of their legislators on bills of that scale and scope, not less — certainly not less,” said Colin Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring, a conservative group that’s asking members to sign a pledge that they will read the health care package before voting on it.

Let Freedom Ring’s Responsible Health Care Reform Pledge also asks lawmakers to insist the health package is posted online for at least 72 hours before a vote.

The group has faxed the pledge to all 535 congressional offices twice and has tasked summer interns with follow-up calls, said Hanna. Of the 116 who’ve agreed to the pledge, not a single one is a Democrat.

The last line is no surprise. When you're in the driver's seat and are trying to push home unpopular legislation, you don't want anyone to see it before it gets passed. Even if you promised to allow that to happen when you were on the campaign trail.

Go and read the whole thing, and you'll understand how bad the problem is, and that it extends to both Republicans and Democrats. Do you know what you won't find? A single line expressing just how incredibly retarded this whole thing is. Not from Republicans, not from Democrats, not from commentators or pundits or even the writer of the article. After describing a process that guarantees that the people voting for legislation don't write it or interpret it, no one wonders why the fuck such a completely idiotic and illogical system is in place. No one.

Just in case it didn't sink in-- there's an entire bureaucracy built around deciphering the language in legislation that is being presented for votes. That bureaucracy isn't clarifying the language for the average American. They're simplifying it for THE LEGISLATORS. That's simply unbelievable.

It is telling that in the portion (not quoted above) about the attempt to ram through clean energy legislation (with an additional 300 pages added at the last moment), the criticism against Republican complaints about the last minute addition came down to "well, it had lots of stuff that they would've liked" and "their complaints held a vote up so long that they had time to read it." Heaven forbid that you actually answer as to why you tried to slip an additional 300 pages into critical and controversial legislation at the last second, eh? Dumbasses.