Law makers (and lawyers) prefer the things they deal with be arcane. It’s job security, and it allows them all kinds of shenanigans.

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 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.

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.

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.

I hate poor people.

I hate rich people.

I hate Team Red

I hate Team Blue.

I am an equal opportunity bigot.

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?

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.

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.

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.

(OUCH!)

Maybe Dave is usually pretty happy after that too!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kygJbw-sZJw

I think “buggered” would cover it.

#3 Boyd Durkin

Sorry to break the bad news, but we’re fucked.

We should find a different word for what’s happening. Generally speaking, I’m usually pretty happy after I’ve been fucked.

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.