At a press conference this afternoon, Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) pushed back against GOP attempts to read aloud bills that are being hustled through the lame duck.
“I would hope that those senators who have talked about the desecration of the spirit of Christmas would understand that reading bills is a total waste of time,” Durbin said. “The omnibus appropriation bill has now been posted on the Internet for 48 hours. Even a slow-reading senator could be working their way through it by Saturday.”
Reading bills aloud is an obvious, and deliberate, waste of time. Trying to score points on Durbin by ignoring the obvious doesn't constitute much of an argument.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBut the reality is that while you can READ the bill by maybe Saturday, UNDERSTANDING IT will take much longer.
Why?
Because the way bills are written, large chunks of them are amendments to existing statutes. Here is a made up hypothetical:
69 USC 1313 is amended to read:
"The effective date of the rate specified in 69 USC 1312 shall be [strike through]January 1, 2011[/strike through] April 15, 2013."
You can't just read this part of the bill to really understand it. What is the rate specified in 69 USC 1312? You need to go look that statute up and read it. And it will probably reference other statutes. And there is probably another section of the bill that changes the rate. And another than affects a definition. And there could be a hundred other statutes not mentioned anywhere, but that reference the statute being amended. What happens to them?
To actually have a real understanding what a bill does can take hours of additional research per page. It takes whole agencies like state-level human services agencies (disclosure, I work for one and did this) weeks with many subject matter experts working non-stop to come to a bare bones understanding of what a 2,000 page bill might mean.
The reality is that no one in Congress really knows what the full impact of a giant bill will be. These bills are created by dozens of congresscritters stuffing their pet projects together into one omnibus, with hundreds of staffers working on just their individual components, to cobble together something that no one person can fully review in comprehend in weeks, let alone days.
Huge lobbying firms and giant industry representatives then offer up dozens of amendments that are adopted with little scrutiny, because these big players have curried favor with legislators. Then hearings are held in which legislators do nothing to advance actual knowledge so much as pontificate about how we need to do "something" for "the children" or how we can't "spend our way out of a recession."
So when the bill gets to the floor, no one in Congress can even recognize their own contributions any more.
THIS IS HOW LAWS ARE MADE.
It is any wonder Americans are fed up? The time has come to go back to short bills with single subjects, written in plain terms that people can understand, with impacts that are easily determined with little additional research.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAnd the Omnibus Bill has been in the works for months, only to be foisted on us at the last minute under a deadline creating a crisis by a lameduck Congress whose actions were soundly rejected a month ago by the electorate!
Seriously...
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAemJeff: the point is that this monstrosity of a bill is fundamentally opposed to our democratic values. The nation is worse off for the growth of Omnibus bills over the last two decades and hand-waving defenses like Durbin's deserve ridicule.
We shouldn't be passing bills this large. Reading out loud is a tactic for pointing that out.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abusemaybe Durbin should be quizzed on the bill...
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBetter a little waste of time reading the bill than a massive waste of money passing the bill.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseUsing people who just so recently lost an election to pass key, previously-neglected pieces of one's agenda, so close to the expiration of their terms, doesn't constitute much of a governing style, beyond cramming your foot down someone's throat.
The first priority should have been a continuing resolution, to hold spending constant to simply fund the government, since the 111th Congress is the first in history to pass ZERO appropriations bills, and failed, in abrogation of the Budget act of 1974, to pass a budget.
Yes, asking the clerk to read bills is a deliberate time-waster. It's much in keeping with the audacity in the first place to use a lame-duck session as one last hurl of progressive lawmaking before a large group of losers scuttles back home.
Each side uses tactics. Get over it. At least with "reading bills", it's made abundantly clear on the congressional record what the legislation actually says, so I'm sure your objection to that would not be academic, but practical in nature, right? You are a stickler for trains arriving at the station on time? Something like that?
Again, where were you when Zoe Lofgren wasted your time by calling Steven Colbert as a witness during a committee hearing?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseUnfortunately, Mr. Durbin is correct in the general malaise regarding readings of bills, both in Congress and the American people.
See, if the reverse were true, the American people would know about S.AMDT.4865, and therefore, all this nonsense about Bush sending us into war in Iraq because of the threat from Iraq using WMD would have been shown to have been a creature of the Democrats, and their efforts of foisting this canard on Bush.
The opposite took place, people didn't read it, or were apathetic, and well, that lie stuck stronger than a fly on Durbin's cheek.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAemJeff is absolutely right. Reading bills aloud will accomplish nothing. It's a stunt -- nothing more, nothing less. Sorry Robert, but you caught my Senator in a rare moment where I actually agree with him.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseReading the bill should be an ADA compliance requirement. Blind citizens who don't have the ability to read the bill in 48 hours should have the bill read out loud so that they can listen to it played back. Anyway, this kind of legislative-ese really has to be read out loud in order to be fully appreciated (just randomly selecting from page 1264-1266, there is a sentence that is 400 words long).
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe only part of a bill that is read by these incompetents (if they read anything at all) is the part that applies to their district and themselves. And to a large degree, their staff are the ones who know what's in each bill. It's a travesty that these lame congressman are thinking of passing this spending monstrosity.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOf course demanding that the bill be read aloud is a delaying tactic. That's a feature, not a bug. There are less than two weeks left for this lameduck Congress to commit the legislative version of grand larceny. Delay equals prevention of at leats some of the mischief. But the demand to read it aloud also drives home the point that "omnibus" bills are a fundamentally shameful way to go about the nation's business. The whole point of omnibus measures is to cobble together an orgy of personal and political interests to achieve enough votes for passage. These jackals are supposed to be addressing the NATIONAL interest.
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