I remain baffled by the Republicans’ obsession with the length of bills produced by Congress. Jeff Sessions continues the tradition while discussing the Senate’s immigration reform bill.
In their zeal to rush this 1,200-page train wreck through the Senate with as many votes as possible, Democrat leadership whipped every single member of their conference.
This follows on Bill Kristol and Rich Lowry’s effort yesterday:
Finally, there is the sheer size of the bill and the hasty manner in which it was amended and passed. Conservatives have eloquently and convincingly made the case against bills like this during the Obama years.
I don’t understand why the size of a bill is an argument against it. Furthermore, I don’t understand why the Republicans think size is a compelling argument.
The best I can do is to suggest that perhaps a large bill indicates a degree of complexity, which means one must put some effort into understanding all that it does, which means that stupid and lazy people are not going to know all that the bill does, which means that the people complaining are lazy and stupid.
true, but more insidious than that. most of the ALEC and Koch recruits are simple minded grifters (often, in my observation, with a history of some legally marginal situation that would prevent them from straying from the ALEC/ Koch line); by carping away at the “multi-page bills are a sign of sloppy thinking” they constantly make the point that simple minded grifters are just as able at governing as any law school grad or physicist (Rush Holt). and the carping promotes an anti-government pov
That is basically the whole mythos of America though.The idea that all you need is the good common sense you get when you’re down to Earth, not the aristocracy of Europe.
Much of the GOP base doesn’t like reading and don’t trust those who enjoy their literacy, so these bullshit arguments are happily lapped up and repeated by their base. I’m not kidding, though I wish I were.
Funny how the thousand-plus pages in the Patriot Act and the super-duper-rushed “debate” before its passage weren’t injected into the political bloodstream by the conservative movement back then.
Funny how that rushed debate moved forward quickly after the Senate Majority Leader and the Senate Judiciary Committee chair received letters tainted with anthrax.
Dems should always respond with something like: “Yes, and we have 50 states to provide for, 465 Congressional districts, 3,143 counties and 313.9 million citizens to consider. Maybe our bill should be little bit longer.”
Leaving the stupid with nothing but obstruction. Just say no to reading.
It’s true that giant, complex bills tend to keep citizens in ignorance of what the government is doing to them — which happens to be the GOP’s Prime Directive. The irony just keeps coming.
Runaway regulation. Too many laws. Too many regulations is the opposite of small government. It is the poster child for “BIG GOVERNMENT” coming to take your money and freedoms away. It’s a rhetorical craziness, symbolizing the big, big governemnt. That’s Sessions’, Krisol’s, and Lowry’s narrative theme.
That said, if you had to read through the ACA, the problem is that it is both too big and too small. It went into excruciating butterfly-pinning detail about some provisions in order to insert loopholes. But it amended and repealed sections of existing law without context. An ordinary citizen trying to read one of these bills for themselves would throw up their hands in frustration. It is the essence of opaque legislation.
And too many members of Congress want to use a bill likely to pass to camp on a rider or insert a loophole that, in some cases, reverses the intent of a section or even the entire bill.
I think your point is exactly correct. The size is simply used to reinforce the symbolic representation of runaway government. It is the perfect straw man to substantiate their world view, not only the minds of their base, but also to reinforce it in the minds of the vast swath of low information voters who are looking for a simple outlet for their feeling of disenfranchisement from the vaunted fantasy of “The American Dream”. This, and the age old right wing trope, “I’m from the government,and I’m here to help you’, always resonates.
Ironically, the grandparents of these same people were, by and large, thankful that the government was there when the wheels fell off the American wagon in the 1930’s. People are now convinced that those circumstances are no longer relevant in today’s world.
All you need to see the cognitive dissonance was when President Obama floated the idea of privatizing the Tennessee Valley Authority. A lot of “small government” politicians started hollering that TVA was necessary to jobs in their region.
Big bill, big government, big bureaucracy. I mean, why do we need all these elites diplomats when all you have to do is be on cue to say “tear down this wall”? Why, I could cut out the tumor just as good with my hunting knife than these doctors with all them machines.
Too bad the Reps are even deeper into bloating bills to give their paymasters Get Out of Jail Free cards.
That said, the bill in question probably could have been edited down to 10% of the verbiage and been a better bill if all the “special considerations” and wiggle room were deleted.
People who don’t read are intimidated by people who do.
I can’t, it’s never made sense to me.
Still, bills don’t need to be this long, but Republicans seem to demand it when they add their corporate welfare in there.
I gotta say this detail drives me insane about the modern GOP. Republicans demanded and got all sorts of amendments in the ACA, the whole concept was a Republican-friendly approach, and they voted unanimously against it anyway. If a Bill is meant to help the poor and middle-class, THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WILL NOT PROVIDE ANY VOTES FOR IT. With this scorched-earth strategy, huge compromise from the Dem caucus only offers a “bipartisan” cover for bad policy. No policy is preferable to bad policy; it means that nothing gets fixed now, but We The People will just have to figure out who to hold responsible for that.
I loved Nancy SMASH’s summary of the recent Farm Bill debacle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4WIY2DoN-g
She points out with incredulity that 58 Republicans who voted for the most extreme poison-pill amendment to the Farm Bill voted “No” on the final bill anyway. What. The. Fuck?? The amendment gained them no votes on the Republican side and, predictably, cost them about two dozen votes from the Dem caucus.
They are actively and openly uninterested in governing. Vandals, that’s what they are.
I think it’s like this Boo — a typical Rethug voter worries that the size and complexity of any bill will allow all manner of terrible injustices, written in impenetrable legalese, to slip through. He/she probably got screwed once in a contract dispute, and thinks that by keepin’ it “simple” this can be avoided. In other words, he/she has no idea how real laws are written or adjudicated in a modern society. Complexity cannot be avoided, sorry.
This is what I think as well. When people bring up the length of the bill to me it is always about all the dangers that are hidden in the lengthy text.
When most of the dangers are in the short text that says “Amend USC Section 49 (1)(a)c to insert “not” into “shall continue””…that is the sort of line in legislation that can do incredible damage.
It was only a single paragraph in a “securities modernization” bill that repealed Glass-Steagall and forbade government agencies from regulating any additional financial produce (read “derivatives”). That bill, passed in 1999, with changes in language snuck in after passage and before President Clinton’s signature, allowed banks to destroy our economy.
The longer passage slip in the bad stuff through the drone factor. A list of items drones on and on and on so you don’t notice at quick reading where the goodies for some lobbyist have been put in.
Exactly.
In addition to this kind of amazing destruction that replacing “not” with “shall continue”, we also have the ability without the line item veto to put in unrelated shit.
George McGovern pointed out that a healthcare reform bill could have been one sentence on one page:
The bills are hundreds of pages long because they’re written by lobbyists. And as John Conyers stated in “Farenheit 911,” no members of Congress read the bills.
Republicans are only carping at this time because they suspect that the blue team is burying what could be poison pills for the red team because they know how easy it’s been in the past for the red team to do that.
Lobbyists writing the bills isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Though the real problem isn’t that they write the bills. It’s that too many members of congress don’t understand policy, let alone the workings of “how” the government works, so they have no choice but to have the lobbyists write them. Barney Frank was an expert at both; we need more like him in there.
Lobbyists don’t work for us. Most are corporate employees. So, yes, it is necessarily a bad thing. (It’s also why the ACA is a couple thousand pages and incomprehensible to the average person.)
In the vaguest sense sure. But you can’t have moron legislatures who have no idea how things work to be writing bills. It’s not enough to have a bill saying “this practice is illegal” because it could be too broad and sweeping to hit unintended parties.
Do I want Mariuana Policy Project to be writing a bill, or legislatures who have no expertise?
If only “moron legislatures” wrote bills, it would make it far easier for the public to see that they are “morons” and easier to get rid of them and repeal all the crap they passed.
Has there been even one decent major piece of federal legislation passed in the past two decades since lobbyists took over more fully? Self-correction of bad legislation had been totally lost. Appears now that the S&L debacle created by the Reagan era deregulation wasn’t corrected so much as hidden for future blow-up.
Agreed! McGovern had it right. I’d like to also point out that the original US Constitution consists of just 4,543 words and it’s held up pretty damn well. Quite frankly the fewer pages those losers in Congress write the better off we are.
Aren’t the “pages” in bills very sparse? IIRC you can fit the amount of text on one of those pages in 1/10 of a normal 8.5×11 page normally formatted. So we should really divide the bill page counts by 10.
Of course it is rational. When you have 1200 pages of stuff, and you agree to vote for it, there are 601 pages you agree with and 599 pages you disagree with. Large bills have large amounts of crap you don’t want to agree with. A small bill is specific. You don’t have to compromise.
It’s not that mysterious, folks. What the Repukeliscum want is a no-compromise bill they can agree with 100%. Such a bill is not going to pass the Senate, but that is what they want.
I don’t understand why the code is so mysterious here.
I’d concede that arguments of this type are a lot closer to revealing the GOP’s true motivation for opposing big Bills. It felt good to bring my snark upthread, though.
maybe Sen. Sessions needs to attend an Evenly Wood Speed Reading Course. I was taught the basics of Speed Reading in the fourth grade, maybe Congress needs to take a course too.
http://www.ewrd.com/ewrd/index.asp