Read the Bills Act

The U.S. Senate should pass the “Read the Bills Act.”

This Act was written in 2006 by Downsize DC, which is a non-profit focused on decreasing the size of the federal government. This Act has since been sponsored and proposed in the U.S. Senate by Senator Rand Paul.

This Act would require legislators who want to vote YES on a bill to sign an affidavit swearing to have read or heard read the entire bill. Every bill would also be required to be read aloud before a quorum in both chambers.

This Act would also require legislation to be publicly posted at least 7 days before it can be voted on in order to give legislators and the American public more time to read and discuss it.

This Act is NEEDED now more than ever because every year the size of bills are getting longer and longer while our legislators are given less and less time to read them.

For example, The Dodd-Frank bill was 1,800 pages. The Affordable Care Act was 2,500 pages. And the 2018 Consolidated Appropriations Act was 2,232 pages.

And this has all culminated into the most outrageous example where on December 21st 2020, the 5,593 page Cornibus bill, the longest bill ever passed by Congress, was introduced just hours before Representatives and Senators were to vote on it.

Now you'd think the fact none of our elected representatives read a bill that costs more than two Iraq Wars would’ve doomed it to failure, but nope! The exact opposite happened! In our hyper-partisan era, it was able to get broad bipartisan support!

It got broad bipartisan support because it was negotiated and agreed to by the Democratic Leadership via Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schemer and the Republican Leadership via Mitch McConnell and the Trump Administration. But unlike Nancy Pelosi who was able to make time from the hair salon to be directly involved in negotiations, the Author of the Art of the Deal wasn’t able to make time from the golf course to negotiate the most consequential piece of legislation of his administration. He appointed his Treasury Secretary to be his lead negotiator. It’s a well-known fact that Trump was often kept away from serious negotiations because he was liable to give away major concessions in an attempt to get his name on something. Anything! It was then only AFTER the bill was passed in the House and Senate that Donald Trump decided to complain on Twitter before taking off to Mar-A-Lago for a nice Christmas vacation. From afar, at the behest of his base, Trump begged McConnell to remove the pork and increase the stimulus check from $600 to $2,000, but McConnell used Trump’s ADHD tweets to package Trump’s requests in such a way that would doom the $2,000 stimulus check to failure by simply tying it to other measures that Democrats would never vote for, i.e. poison pills. Unsurprisingly, despite Trump’s tough tweeting, he capitulated to Mitch McConnell by signing the bill.

The only senators to vote against the Cornibus were 6 Republicans: Marsha Blackburn, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, Rick Scott, and Rand Paul.

But ultimately what party was or is in power isn’t as important to the larger point here, which is that under Republican and Democratic administrations bills have been getting longer and longer with a shorter and shorter time frame to read them. The trend is accelerating because it’s easier to pass BIG unread bills and here's why…

1. Pork.

Legislators are okay with voting for a behemoth bill so long as they get some of the bacon, i.e. it contains some money for their state, district, and/or donors. They’re also okay with voting for it if their party leadership is voting for it, i.e. the ol’ if your friend jumped off a bridge would you? U.S. Senators wouldn’t just jump off the bridge, but they’d finance it.

On a personal level, when I was studying political science at university I was in a Model Congress class where each student was given a politician to play for the semester. I was given Justin Amash. I did two smart things (if I can say so myself). First, based on the extent of Justin Amash’s independent views and the fact our Model Congress was controlled by Democrats I was the only person in the class of 100 students to leave my party by declaring myself an independent (this was about 6 years before the real Justin Amash would make national news by declaring himself an independent). Secondly, in exchange for leaving the Republican party, the Democratic leadership promised to bring one of my bipartisan bills to a vote. I gave my bill to the Speaker of the House a few hours before class hoping that he wouldn’t read it, which he didn’t. And so the infrastructure bill that virtually all the Democrats and Republicans voted for also contained a hidden tax cut. Is our real congress any different? Unfortunately, no. The older I get the more I realize there are no adults in the room.

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