TheAgitator.com
Why “Reading the Bill” Won’t Matter
Monday, August 17th, 2009USA Today notes that even forcing legislators to read the health care legislation in the House probably wouldn’t do much good. The bill is so bogged down with bureaucrat-eze, few of them are likely to understand it.
Take the opening lines of one of the bill’s most controversial sections, the one about voluntary “end of life” counseling:
“SEC. 1233. ADVANCE CARE PLANNING CONSULTATION. (a) Medicare. — (1) IN GENERAL. — Section 1861 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395x) is amended — (A) in subsection (s)(2) — (i) by striking ‘and’ at the end of subparagraph (DD); (ii) by adding ‘and’ at the end of subparagraph (EE); and (iii) adding at the end the following new subparagraph: ‘(FF) advance care planning consultation (as defined in subsection (hhh)(1) … “
Complex bills like these are generally written with heavy input from the lobbyists and interest groups who have so much at stake in them. The public doesn’t find out exactly what the implication of striking “and” from subparapraph (DD) might be until the bill has already been implemented.
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.
In Commonwealth parliamentary systems a bill is accompanied by a document called “explanatory notes” which would explain stuff like “the effect of striking ‘and’ from subparagaph DD is …”
It means they added a new subsection (FF) after (EE).
Sorry to break the bad news, but we’re fucked.
Yes, actually we’ve been fucked for awhile now.
On an amusing and slightly related note, I offer this satirical piece about the consequences of not reading bills….
http://theskunk.org/2009/08/congressman-legalizes-pot-for-himself/
(H/T to the WTF section of reddit)
@ Boyd Durkin # 3
You mean you just noticed that?
;)
When a company that issues debt seeks approval of an indenture amendment (an obtuse, hard-to-penetrate document governing the relationship between the issuer (borrowing company) and the noteholders (lenders)) from noteholders, they often use similarly complicated amendment language. However, they also provide a redline reflecting all of the changes to the original amendment so it reads (relatively) easily. Does Congress not do that? If not, why not?
That should read original indenture, not original amendment. So you get a full document reflecting all changes caused by the amendment. The changes are marked so they can be easily seen by the reader.
Sorry for any confusion.
And ,of course,any bill they pass will exempt congress.
And really, there’s at least three degrees:
1. Reading the bill.
2. Understanding the language of the bill.
3. Understanding what the bill applies to.
If you hit the first two, but still fail the third, you end up with a shoulder thing that goes up.
Congress still can’t figure out one sentence it wrote in the most important bills it ever wrote, over two hundred years ago.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
You think they need to read and figure out what a 1000 page bill means?
It means what they ‘feel’ it should mean, it doesn’t matter what is written in the bill.
So, if no one can understand the bill, then how can they credibly deny all assertions being made by so-called scaremongers.
At least we can be thankful that there is a powerful and well funded lobby in DC who is looking out for ordinary citizens and taxpayers.
Hahahaha! Just kidding about that last part.
I think it’s telling evidence that our system that allows, promotes, and rewards lobbying so deeply and well is so inherently flawed.
In essence, we elect representatives who then allow those with the most money and persuasiveness to write the bills they don’t bother to read or understand.
We should find a different word for what’s happening. Generally speaking, I’m usually pretty happy after I’ve been fucked.
Dave
I think “buggered” would cover it.
“Trust me. I know what I’m doing…”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kygJbw-sZJw
Aresen don’t assume!
Maybe Dave is usually pretty happy after that too!
Well, since Congresscritters are either donkeys or elephants, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t.
(OUCH!)
The whole point of such verbose language is “misdirection” – an old magician’s trick.
I think a web site is going to come along to revolutionize how we view and discuss bills. OpenCongress is already close. You can comment and get permalinks at the paragraph level.
The next step is adding a user trust/authority system like that of (the amazing programming resource) StackOverflow. Users could attach “concerns” that could be voted up/down and answers (also w/ votes), and the site could display a summary of concerns above a certain threshold.
StackOverflow users know how damn effective it is. At least someone should make a version for asking general questions about government/legislation.
Not only should they be forced to read it, their vote should depend on their passing a quiz on the meaning of it.
Just so everyone is clear, Americans have been writing statutes in substantially this fashion for well over a hundred years, and for good reason.
In the early nineteenth century, you could frequently read through a statute and understand it as a self-contained document. The problem came afterward when you were trying to figure out what law addressed particular subject matter, and you’d see several statutes from several different years that addressed the same subject in different ways with no clue how they were intended to fit together. That was extremely problematic.
Over the course of the nineteeth century states, and eventually Congress, moved toward a code model: the statutes were combined into a single code and then subsequent bills took the form of amendments to the code.
The page counts on bills written in that way can be pretty high: by tradition, they are written in pamphlet size, with big type and double spacing, to facilitate mark-up by hand.
As RB points out, bills in that form are difficult or impossible to read as stand-alone documents. However, there are reports prepared by staff that typically walk the reader through each section of the bill and describe its function.
An example of a Senate report on a recent veterans’ health bill is here. You can browse all reports for the current Congress here.
At present, reports are not available on the various proposals. One will probably be prepared in each of the House and the Senate as the various committee bills in each chamber are combined into a single bill for floor vote. There will then be a conference committee to create a combined bill, along with a conference report explaining the combined bill. The Senate and House will then each vote on the conference bill.
In this case, because these proposals involve substantial new legislation, rather than technical amendments to existing statutes, you can figure out what’s going on pretty quickly by just reading the bill itself. (For example, you could start by reading the table of contents to the Senate Health (Kennedy) proposal.)
In the very specific case of Section 1233, referenced in RB’s post, it’s pretty easy to see what’s going on there. The statute as it stands looks like:
(AA) stuff;
(BB) stuff;
(CC) stuff;
(DD) stuff; and
(EE) stuff.
The language quoted above moves the “and” to after (EE) and adds a new (FF), like so:
(AA) stuff;
(BB) stuff;
(CC) stuff;
(DD) stuff;
(EE) stuff; and
(FF) stuff.
“Just so everyone is clear, Americans have been writing statutes in substantially this fashion for well over a hundred years, and for good reason.”
Well now maybe its time to change that. I’m sure the original intent wasn’t to allow politician/prostitutes to sell legislative favors to lobbyists.
I had been very angry with my Democratic friends because their response to any legitimate concerns about socialized health care were met with “Y DO U H8 POOR PPL?” I’ve asked them to please explain some legitimate concerns and have received one lukewarm explanation (that wasn’t really an explanation).
Since you bring it up, I wonder how much of the problem is that they, themselves, don’t even have basic answers for why you should support the legislation. After all, if the language is so dense that you can’t understand it, how the fuck can you clarify anything for anyone?
drunkenathiest
I hate poor people.
I hate rich people.
I hate Team Red
I hate Team Blue.
I am an equal opportunity bigot.
Maybe if people actually read the bill, they wouldn’t be so supportive of it. The reform that so many people so desperately want isn’t outlined in the bill at all.
@alkali:
Law language is a big reason why I hated taking International Politics. Ew, having to write pointless UN resolutions in legalese and defend them…it’s a wonder I passed the course.
The statutes were combined into a single code and then subsequent bills took the form of amendments to the code.
Unfortunately, an apparent desire to keep things numbered nicely often totally hoses things. For example, if section I.5.a has 5 sections and the third is stricken, then what was I.5.a(4) will become I.5.a(3) and what was I.5.a(5) will become I.5.a(4). Statutes or portions of the code which refer to I.5.a(4) may become ambiguous or dysfunctional.
Things would be much better if there were a rule forbidding the renumbering of any portion of the U.S. code, and requiring that (1) substantial changes to a section would require replacing the section with “STRICKEN” (possibly along with a “See xxx.yyy” reference), and adding a new section with a different number; (2) a heading number could only be deleted if the entire containing block was stricken, thus forbidding reuse of its number; (3) additions to a section would be generally made at the end, unless the structure of a statute required insertion; in that case, numbering would mix alphanumerics as required (e.g. if something must be added between 2.5 and 2.6, the new thing would be 2.5b; if something must be inserted between 2.5 and 2.5b, it would be 2.5a1).
No way that’s going to happen, alas.
drunkenatheist “I had been very angry with my Democratic friends because their response to any legitimate concerns about socialized health care were met with “Y DO U H8 POOR PPL?” I’ve asked them to please explain some legitimate concerns and have received one lukewarm explanation (that wasn’t really an explanation).”
I know exactly how you feel. It’s like dealing with a religious cult or something. Leftists just accept some things on faith and you better not question them or you’re a heretic.
supercat: That’s what they do, mostly. From time to time they do renumber sections of the code for convenience, but generally only where the sections to be renumbered are unlikely to be referred to elsewhere. A standard edition of the US Code (West’s US Code Annotated, or USCA) includes notes to each section that track changes over time.
To clarify, my point in the prior comment, and here, is not that reading statute books requires some kind of arcane knowledge or some internet tool that doesn’t yet exist. You can read the bills now, for yourself. You can read the committee and conference reports, when they come out. That doesn’t mean they are good bills, to be sure, but it is a lot less difficult to follow what’s going on then some people imagine. There is a logic to it.
(I do think the frequently heard criticism that no human being could possibly read these bills, let alone understand what they contain, is just silly. If members of Congress and their staffs don’t read and understand them it is because they are stupid and lazy, not because the task is beyond human capacity.)
I “H* POOR PPL” because they keep voting to make me pay for stuff for them that they themselves can’t afford.
These bills should be computerized, and whatever section is being referred to should be only a click away, either in a pop-up, or in a “Read More” link that expands right there on the page.
Law makers (and lawyers) prefer the things they deal with be arcane. It’s job security, and it allows them all kinds of shenanigans.