The U.S. Congress just passed President Obama's trillion-ish dollar "stimulus" package. The more the public heard about the bill, the less they seemed to like it, so the Democrats rammed that puppy through as quickly as possible with as little time as they could manage for the public to digest it. They only released the final text of the bill one day before the vote.
But the damned thing's over 1,000 pages. It's not just that there was not sufficient time to debate or consider the bill. As Representative Tom Price (R-Georgia) put it succinctly, "it is physically impossible for any member [of Congress] to have read this bill."
I find it difficult to believe that even a good liberal honestly thinks this is an acceptable way of doing business. Even if you think that deficit stimulus spending is a good idea for our economy — as if the years of Bush deficits don't disprove that idea — surely you can't think it a good idea to commit to a trillion dollars of spending before anyone has even read the bill.
Here's what I would consider to be a truly (i.e. not facetious or satirically) modest proposal to ever so gently insert some small and simple measure of sanity back into our legislative process; this seems important enough to merit a constitutional amendment. Some smart lawyer might improve upon my layman's language, but how about something real simple like:
It shall be the inviolable right of any member of the Senate or House of Representatives to have the full text of any bill read aloud on the floor of Congress before a final vote for passage.
Obviously this would play somewhat into the hands of right-wing types with something like this bill, but that's only because the process is so severely out of control. If you think the government should drop one septillion dollars into subsidizing electric cars/glorified golf carts, that's fine. I think we just did that, but who knows? No one has read the thing.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Jet
In the midst of all the tension here lately, a comedy piece is just what was needed Al-thanks!
By the way 700 Billion is not Trilionish, except in your flawed reality.
2 - Clavos
Um, actually, it's $789 billion, Jet.
You round off like my wife:
"Look! This is car is only $35,000," she says, indicating a sticker that reads $35,999.
3 - Jet
Nice deflection but even 789 Billion is not trillionish.
4 - Dan(Miller)
Al,
I agree, for the most part. Recent evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, however, I suspect that most Honorable Members do know how to read, some of them without excessive lip movement. Those who aren't up to such a task probably have assistants who are.
I would be very happy if a reading break could be mandated -- say fifteen minutes per page -- for the Honorable Members to try to read for themselves and to understand what they are being asked to vote on. For a one thousand and seventy-one page monstrosity, that would amount to 10,605 minutes or 267.75 hours or just 22.31 twelve hour days.
Put another way, for the "Stimulus" package of $760 billion or so, that would just be $47,307,000.00 and change per minute (only $2,838,000,000.00 and change per hour) of reading and perhaps even understanding.*
Although more modest than your proposal, I think this may be an improvement. An added benefit is that it would encourage at least a modicum of self reliance on the part of the Honorable Members.
Dan(Miller)
*Yes, I did check the arithmetic. I double and triple checked, because I found the numbers incredible. Scary though the numbers may be, my spreadsheet is allegedly infallible.
5 - Clavos
How can you keep saying "Honorable Members" with such a straight face, Dan(Miller)?
6 - Clavos
Besides, it sounds like Victorian-era Chinese porn.
7 - Dan(Miller)
Clav,
Fortunately, no one can see my face when I type this stuff except the pups (my wife is now driving back from Boquete) and they don't care. Besides, I do think of them as
"Horrible""Honorable," evenBarleyBarney Frank.Dan(Miller)
8 - Dan(Miller)
As to whether their members are honorable, that is something upon which reasonable men (and women) could easily disagree. I wouldn't touch that with a six foot pole.
Thinking about it, however, perhaps the entire "stimulus" package has some hitherto unexplored elements of Chinese porn.
Dan(Miller)
9 - Clavos
Sorry for my delay in responding, my guffaws freaked out the cat, and I had to dig her claws out, one by one, from the ceiling stucco...
There is a pornographic je ne sais quoi about the very concept of "stimulus."
10 - Jet
So, what is being presumed is that only Democrats have multiple staff to divide and read legislation and summarize it for them in a timely manner-as I said before the bailout bill is the same basically as it was three weeks ago except for a few ass kisses for the whining Republicans.
Republicans (and their pets?) do all their own reading.
That explains a lot of the legislation during the Bush years.
11 - Al Barger
Jet, thank you. But besides the idea of rounding for rhetoric's sake, this is deficit spending for which we will be paying buttloads of interest. It will most certainly end up costing well over a trillion dollars by the time you consider that. When I describe it as a trillion dollar bill, I was really rounding down.
And that's assuming that the spending authorized by the provisions of the bill doesn't turn out to be a big bunch more than the $789 they're saying publicly. Not like a government program would somehow come out costing twice what they said it would when they passed it without anybody getting to actually read it.
Dan, I figure my proposal is more modest than yours. Yours would in this case suggest a requirement of nearly a month - very modest and reasonable to consider such a gargantuan bill and sum of money.
But I'm figuring that with round the clock shifts of speed readers, they could at least perfunctorily read it into the public record (and C-Span cameras) in perhaps as little as three or four days. But maybe your spreadsheet could tell us something different.
12 - Jet
As for sneaking things into legislative bills, we've all safely forgotten how Bush had his GOP cronies sneak mysterious immunity from being prosecuted for war crimes into their's right?
13 - Jet
Of course Al, and the Iraq war only ran us $29.95 and sales tax right?
14 - Ruvy
Have fun kiddies - substituting all those bad imaginary dollars for good imaginary dollars. Can't wait till the real
liberalsObama worshippers on this site start seriously praying to their various idols for "hope and change" (especially some pocket change) they can really believe in....Man! Only $769 billion is in
stimulationstimulus! It's enough to make a grown manmasturbatedrool with jealousy....In the meantime, back out in the Wild Wild Middle East, Netanyahu is proving what a whore he is. Next stop for him - kissing Hillary's rear end and smelly her pink chaddies!
15 - C i n d y
Leave it to Dan(Miller) to forgo using that standard 10-foot pole.
16 - Al Barger
Well Jet, you seem to have missed my final point of invoking the Patriot Act. Reading the bills would be just as much a requirement for Republican legislation as Democratic. When Sarah Palin is president four years from now trying to clean up Obama's mess, the bills that she and her congressional cronies are pushing should get exactly the same scrutiny.
Also, I am not a chauvinistic supporter of President Bush. Nalle and I among others bitched to high heavens about Bush and the Republican funny money - though even that crazy spending pales in comparison to this "stimulus" bill - much less what else they've got in the pipeline for even just the next few months.
Again, I am NOT a Republican. The nearest would be to say that I generally hate them marginally less than Democrats. In fairness though, I want to take this rare opportunity to say that I am actually positively proud of every single Republican in the house - and all but three Republican senators.
As to the cost of the Iraq war, yes I concede that it has been very expensive. But we're actually getting something for that. We've paid out the nose, but at this point it appears that Bush was in fact pretty much successful in that democracy project.
For our money and soldiers lives, we have turned one of the worst players in the world into one of the best. Democracy really is taking root there. The insurgency is done, and the holdout Sunnis bought in with the recent elections.
Things are mostly looking pretty rosey in Iraq at this point, relatively speaking. President Obama should be sending Bush flowers and candy for taking care of that problem. And now other people in the neighborhood have a local Arab model for democracy and progress.
17 - Dan(Miller)
C i n d y,
Standards in this glorious time of hope and change must be examined and discarded if no longer appropriate. Ten foot poles are unwieldy and therefore far less usable than shorter ones. Fully hopeful for worthwhile change, I should have said two meter poles. I apologize for my old fashioned notions.
Dan(Miller)
18 - C i n d y
Dan(Miller),
The shorter ones are excellent for the ecology as well. I hadn't thought of that.
By the way, my sentence should have read, "using the standard 10-foot pole."
But, as I like to say, "Close enough for government work."
19 - Jet
Al: Things are mostly looking pretty rosey in Iraq at this point, relatively speaking.
One year from now I'll remind you of that quote.
20 - Al Barger
Jet- Please do.
And might I remind you now of what your side was saying 12 to 18 months ago or so that Iraq was lost, and Harry Reid wanted to run away in defeat?
21 - Jet
Whatever gets you through the night Al.
22 - Arch Conservative
Apparently faith in a false god named Barry gets Jet through the night as he's been working double time to defend his incompetence over the past forty eight hours.
You're truly going to have your work cut out for you if you intend to keep that pace over the next four years following Barry with a pooper scooper.
Good luck with that.
23 - Jet
Now you're preaching to the choir Arch, and half of them aren't even listening!
24 - Arch Conservative
That's probably because they figure any comment submitted by myself or by one of them is going to be summarily followed up by ten of your own barely readable inane raves and it's just not worth their time.
While they may have tired of it I imagine the entertainment value of you going crazy every time someone offers even the slightest criticism of Barry will not soon be lost on me.
He's such a pud that the fodder for such criticism will never stop.
You hear that Jet............that's the sound of the knives being sharpened.
25 - Al Barger
Now Arch, play nice. [I do so relish the opportunity to play good cop.]