Matt Yglesias posts a chart of major pieces of legislation Congress has voted on recently, and how much time they were given to read it between introduction of the final bill and the vote.

Add ‘em up and divide ‘em, and on these bills, our elected legislators were given on average one hour to read every 89.61 pages of law. That’s 89 pages of laws you and I are expected to abide by. That includes time for reading, rereading, researching, and consulting with experts, constituents, and colleagues. That also assumes legislators immediately drop what they’re doing and read the bills the moment they come out of the conference committee.

This is why politicians don’t read laws before voting on them. It’s also how pork projects, nasty little provisions like the RAVE Act that couldn’t get passed on their own, and naming the U.S. Embassy in Rome after Mel Sembler get snuck into the U.S. Code.

Aggravating.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 10th, 2005 at 2:47 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.