Via USAT: Our opinion: Healthy debate
“Read the bill” is typically another way of saying “not so fast,” but there’s no denying the idea’s appeal. Too many bills have been rushed to a vote in Congress with too little time for scrutiny.There’s just one hitch: You could read the entire health bill and still not have a very good idea of how the plan would work. Legislative language is notoriously, necessarily murky.
Anyone who has ever looked at legislation knows that “murky” is perhaps being kind.
As such:
Frankly, though, there’s no substitute for doing homework. For members of Congress, that means talking to committee staff, veteran colleagues and outside experts who know what the legalese is supposed to accomplish.If someone says he has read the whole bill, good for him. But if that’s all he has done, it’s not nearly enough.
Indeed. Of course it beats voting on it without reading it at all (which happens far too often for my taste).
Along these lines Radley Balko notes at Reason Hit and Run:
This is another argument in favor of posting bills in their final form online for a considerable period of time before voting on them, or before they’re signed into law. Crowdsourcing by people who have experience wading through the parentheses and em-dashes might at least help decipher some of the mess to get a clearer picture of what it all means. As it stands, we’re left with the few politicians who helped craft the bill saying, “Just trust us.”That rarely works out well.
Also indeed.
h/t: Chris Lawrence’s Facebook feed.
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August 17th, 2024 at 12:49 pm
I would not agree that in the ideal legislative process, every legislator would have read every bill in detail before voting on it. That is a prescription for inefficiency, otherwise known as exactly the mess we are in.
What really matters is not whether legislators, as individuals, know and understand the details of legislation, but, given that they really can’t, from where do they take their voting “cues.”
I would stipulate that the ideal model is one in which legislators take their cues primarily from PARTY LEADERS who are COLLECTIVELY ACCOUNTABLE.
The longer I study comparative politics and policy-making, the more clear it becomes to me that you can’t have both individual accountability of legislators and nationally efficient policy-making.
If one wants a policy process in which legislators are accountable only for ‘pork,’ one can have that and leave national policy to the executive–though at the cost of efficiency, due to the pork to satisfy legislators and their parochial constituencies.
If, on the other hand, one wants a process in which legislators are accountable for policy then one inevitably gets a system in which legislators take their cues from–and hence are accountable to–interest groups and not to (unorganized, “ordinary”) voters.
The bottom line is: who can understand the details of complex legislation? Party leaders can (maybe). Bureaucrats can. Interest groups surely can. But ordinary voters can’t (nor should we have to; that’s why we have representative democracy). But neither can individual legislators, other than those who serve on the relevant committees and/or get lots of “help” from interest groups and their lobbyists.