Any congressman who isn’t working thirty hours a day, eight days a week is just lazy.
Do you understand that the schedule for when Congress is in session doesn’t include the time they spend doing things like reading bills? So your proposal to solve the problem that Congressmen don’t spend enough time reading bills is to reduce the amount of time they have to do that.
And the reason Congressmen make public appearances is simple. There are a lot of uninformed voters who have no idea what a Congressman actually does. They don’t read a newspaper, much less make an effort beyond that to learn what’s going on. So if their Congressman is spending all his time in the office working, they figure he’s not doing anything because they don’t see it happening. So congressmen have to stop doing any actual work in order to attend public events and create the illusion of working that some voters require.
I don’t have any problem with legislators delegating responsibilities to their staff. But I doubt whether the combined staffs of any one legislator read more than 10% of this bill.
It may be wrong but I’ve heard that much of the bill was scanned and presented to legislators in such a way that they couldn’t even do word searches.
I’m not so sure this is true. While many people choose who to vote for based on ideology, many others decide based on charisma or identity or campaign promises.
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I don’t except the excuse that a Congressman doesn’t read or completely understand a bill because it’s too long or complex. It’s Congress who writes the bills–they decide how long and complex they are. (It’s like a teenager who says they won’t clean their room because it’s too messy and would take too long. If you managed to make the mess, you can manage to clean it up.)
If Congress reduced bill size, complex, numbers, etc to a level where they could all have time to read and understand completely every bill, it would probably reduce the number of laws they passed. But I don’t consider that a bad thing, necessarily. And smaller, simpler, fewer bills means their constituents will have an easier time to understand the bills too. That’s a good thing.
Keep in mind that while that the final bill was probably 80% similar to any bill that they had already seen in the previous weeks and that they voted on earlier. So they really needed to just keep up with the changes.
A solution to this problem is manifold. Here is what I think needs to happen:
One bill, one subject. You want to add stuff to a bill, it better be topical. No more sub-paragraphs raising congressional salaries in a bill about environmental land usage. You want a pay raise, you make a bill just for that. Now the bills are smaller and can be digested, plus the politician has to clearly answer for his vote.
Bills are visible (posted on a website) and written in plain English. Commentaries by opposing political parties can be espoused. Citizens can login and comment. Representatives can ask for polls from their voting constituency.
Increase our representation ratio. Even if we had a chance as the public to review a bill before it is voted on, do I really feel that my letter / email / phone call to the representative will be heard if I didn’t contribute heavily to his campaign? I don’t trust a lobbyist to represent my point of view – they are getting paid to promote an idea that might (likely) be contrary to my interest. I don’t want more politicians in Washington, though. By this I mean to say that issues are handled on a community, county, and state level, where my political representative lives in the same neighborhood, or at least in the same county or region. Factionalism, I say!
The fewer laws, the better. Just enforce the ones we have.
I also think that every bill should have a neutral title. Don’t call it the Helping Homeowners Keep Their Homes Act of 2009. Everyone wants what the bill title says so it prejudices people in favor of the bill from the outset…
The Canadian Library of Parliament prepares a legislative summary of the more complex bills for MPs and Senators. These provide a fairly detailed analysis of the bill, with background info, section by section analysis, and additional references. This would probably be useful for the US Congress as well, as the summaries provided by the Congressional Library which I viewed at friedo’s link are very basic. (Note however that our bills are restricted to a single subject, there is no equivalent of earmarks or riders, and additions and amendments can only be made at specific points in the process, resulting in much less complexity for individual bills.)
I agree. I do not like big bills. The parts start in committees. You have a few people hash out the new law. Then it gets into a big bill. The rest of congress can’t deal with the whole big bill so they accept what the committee gave unless a lobbyist has warned of problems. Then the whole shebang gets a yea or nay.
Have you ever read a bill? Especially a large, important bill, which usually modifies existing law? It is not a document that says, “This bill does this and that and such forth.” Instead, it describes how the language of an existing law will be modified. For example, it might say:
Under this Act section 237 of the modified Act part 28 section 34 shall strike from the first comma after the second incident of “and” and replace “for 8 percent” and replace after the period of such sentence with “; and notwithstanding,”.
These bills are mostly written as striking a replacing text in current law. You can’t read the bill and know what it means. You have to get the original law, follow the instructions for strike and replace text, then compare the original to the modified.
Now you can se the specific changes. But what do they really mean? Now you have to read the whole law to get the context. Then you can start to guess how the law actually affects anyone. Forget about guessing about how the changes you can’t comprehended will actually affect people.
I would propose:
Eliminate Acts. All additions or changes to laws must be made directly to US Code, not Acts that must be codified.
Rewrite US Code in plain language. It can be done.
No “super bills”. Bills that involve large amounts of money or law changes must be broken down.
Committees must explain why particular changes are being made to a law and the consequences thereof. Both parties get to make a statement.
Unless there is a non-partisan vote for or against, votes are cast for each change.
Well, it might not really work. But it should as hell would be a good start.
I would bet that if brevity and clear language provisions in bills were passed in Congress, the first thing that would happen would be the formation of new regulatory agencies in every bill.
Brief bill: “We authorize the formation of Agency X to administer the area of law Y under principles A, B and C.”
Agency X will then emit several dozen reams of rules, which are binding on the specific area of law that they were delegated, shifting the complexity burden onto rulemaking, rather than lawmaking. On the one hand, notice and comment rulemaking is pretty much designed for this sort of very detailed and specific treatment of a situation, with considerable input from recognized experts on the field, and not really cared about by anyone outside of that field. On the other hand, this would have the effect of lowering the profile of what goes into the overall body of law, not raising it.
Many parts of the US Code have actually been passed as statute by Congress, meaning you don’t have to go slogging through the Statutes at Large to find out what they actually say. (And in practice, one rarely has to do this anyway, as the US Code is compiled very, very carefully.)
Of course, you can’t go and change stuff in the US Code willy-nilly without passing new legislation in the first place; that requires an Act of Congress. So the idea of “eliminating Acts” makes no sense. I think what you’re actually getting at is that you want to enact all titles of the US Code into positive law (a reasonable goal) and decree that all subsequent legislation amend the Code explicitly. In fact, where titles have been enacted as statute and they need to be amended, that’s usually exactly what is done.
People say this all the time, but I have yet to see compelling proof. I challenge you to rewrite a lengthy section of the Internal Revenue Code in what you consider “plain language” in such a way that it means precisely the same as what it means now, and takes up, let’s say, no more than triple the amount of space.
I can certainly get on board with this. The problem is, how can we enforce it? Each House of Congress has the right to make its own rules, which means they can decide how to write their legislation. So, say we ratify a Constitutional amendment that says “a single bill has to be on one topic only.” Who decides what a “topic” is? Clearly, an omnibus appropriations bill is on the topic of omnibus appropriations!
They already do this. They’re called Committee Reports and you can get them from the GPO website. Here (PDF) is a House budget committee report this year’s main appropriations. It’s a gigantic document whose sole purpose is to explain the appropriations bills in plain language.
Yeesh. It’d take hours just to vote on even relatively simple bills, in that case.
Erhm… if you want all laws to amend US Code, then you’re going to make the “problem” of having bills read the way you just complained about EVEN WORSE. For example, appropriations bills simply say something like, “For the Inspector General of the Department of Transportation, there is appropriated $35,000,000 for fiscal year 2009.” Very easy to understand.
But if you wanted appropriations bills to be incorporated into the US Code, you’d have something like, "In Title 5, US Code, section 1234, strike “2008” and insert “2009”, and strike the number that follows and insert “$35,000,000”. Which is what you were just complaining about.
As for the rest of your points, I feel as though the general question has been addressed and won’t comment further unless the thread is moved to a more appropriate forum.
