Tax Lawyer's Blog

Imagine for a moment an editor at Random House or Knopf who told his boss that he doesn’t read the manuscripts he is responsible for editing because it takes too much time and is too confusing? How long do you think he’d keep his job?

Not very, right?

Well, we now know that our duly elected Congressmen have not read the healthcare bills they are responsible for editing and will be required to vote on.

First it was Representantive John Conyers (D-MI) who said it was too much trouble to read the bill:

I love these members, they get up and say, ‘read the bill.’ 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?

Now it’s Senator Thomas Carper (D-DE):

“I don’t expect to actually read the legislative language because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I’ve ever read in my life,” Carper told CNSNews.com.

Carper described the type of language the actual text of the bill would finally be drafted in as “arcane,” “confusing,” “hard stuff to understand,” and “incomprehensible.” He likened it to the “gibberish” used in credit card disclosure forms.

And if that’s not bad enough, they don’t want you to read the bill either:

A proposal by Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., that would have required the Senate Finance Committee to post the final language of the $900 billion health care reform bill, as well as a Congressional Budget Office cost analysis, on the committee’s website for 72 hours prior to a vote was rejected 12-11.

It is an outrage that there isn’t more outrage about this.

I have 5 very simple questions for Messrs Conyers and Carper:

1. How can you vote on a bill that will affect hundreds of millions of people without having first read it?
2. How do you know that the bill does what you want it to do if you haven’t read it?
3. If Congressmen aren’t reading the bills they write and vote on, who the hell is?
4. If the only people who understand the bills are non-elected officials, what does that say about our democracy?
5. Is this really a government “by and for the people?”

How about we pass a law requiring that Congressmen read the laws they make? If they aren’t capable of understanding a bill written by their own legislative body – as Conyers and Carper admit they aren’t – they should immediately resign because they aren’t qualified for the job.

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