READ THE BILLS !!! IT’S YOUR JOB
July 31st, 2009
Congressman John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan recently said and I quote…”I..I love these members that get up and say read the bill. Wa..what good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and..and you don’t have ah..two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill”.
I have a question congressman. How many lawyers are elected to congressional office? Do they read the bills? Another question is if you can spend $3.4M for an underpass for turtles in Tallahassee maybe we could hire some lawyers to read the bills and then inform the less studious members of congress of what they say.
You may think I am kidding. The taxpayers actually paid for a turtle underpass via Obama’s Stimulus bill.
It is not an accident that congressional bills are 1000 pages. It is also by design that these bills are written in such a fashion that makes them hard to follow. This is done to discourage their reading. There is no need for such complicated, hard to follow legal mumbo jumbo, and their is certainly no need for 1ooo pages. Why not cap them at 300. 600 pages or more is likely to be pork anyway. An example being the turtle bridge or what about the money sent to Union, New York for their homeless problem. You may think that helping the homeless is important and quite noble. The problem is that there is no problem. Union, New York doesn’t have any homeless. If the “spendulus” bill wasn’t as thick as a New York City phone book and it wasn’t rammed through, congress with no time to examine it someone might have caught this ridiculous waste of $578,661. Even if our well-paid representatives don’t want to waste, their precious time reading it perhaps one of their constituents would have done it for them. Then they could give them a call. Something like…hey high paid public servant there is no homeless in Union, New York.
I would like to point out an example of complicated terminology can cause. During the U.S. Air corps infancy the technical and service regulations were written in very sophisticated terminology. Most of those servicing and maintaining the expensive aircraft must have found them cumbersome to follow. Planes were dropping from the skies. Once all manuals were re-written at a 6th grade level this changed. I am not saying those responsible for servicing planes at that time were illiterate, just that easy to follow terminology makes for fewer mistakes.
An airplane is an important and difficult thing to maintain. So is our country, economy, and health care. Obama, Pelosi, Reid and/or whomever is responsible for this collection of ten inch stacks of legal jargon is propelling this nation downward in a tailspin. This formula for disaster must change. Ironically, Barrack Obama knows just what I am talking about. During a 2004 interview, Senator Barrack Obama made the same point. Click on the clip below to hear him in his own words.
This country was established for the people and by the people. The elected officials in Washington work for us. I encourage everyone to call, write or email their representatives and tell them to do their job. They represent us. If they don’t want to do their job, they can be fired. I also encourage anyone that is dedicated to doing a better job to throw his or her hat in the ring for the 2010 election. It wouldn’t take much to replace the self-serving clowns in Washington.
Categories: Basic Lessons, Health Care
