Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Reading is hard

Reading is hard, according to Congressman Paul Hodes (D-NH).
Regarding critics who argue that lawmakers do not even read the bills they are voting on, Hodes said it’s not realistic to expect members of Congress to read every bill word-for-word, as Congress took more than 2,000 votes in the session that ended in December.

He said although he has read much of the legislation, staff summaries in many cases are thorough and accurate as to the major points. Attempting to read every word of every bill would be counterproductive, he said.

“I think you would slow down the business of Congress to a crawl and it would be hard to get done what needs to be done. It’s not necessarily the major problem with the way Congress functions.”
Slowing Congress to a crawl wouldn't be a bug, it would be a feature. How much more legislation do we need, anyway?

We need to run these idiots off. Reprehensible.

2 comments:

Peripatetic Engineer said...

Compare him to Joseph Cao who has made it a point to read the entire health care bill and may vote against it even though he knows it may be political suicide. This may be the only person in congress who puts the country first. Its a funny thing how immigrant Americans seem to take the Constitution more seriously than native born Americans.

Rivrdog said...

The Congressman from New Hampshire is lying to your face. In order to write an "executive summary", SOMEONE has to read the bill, then they have to write the summary. If only two or three days are allocated, even staffers couldn't read a 1,000+ page bill and write a precis on it. Maybe if an army of staffers was used, and each took only 50 pages, but then their work would have to be collected and edited, again using more time than is allowed.

The point is, we pay these reps to be DELIBERATIVE. If they are not going to DELIBERATE, they need to resign.