The Revolution Begins Anew

Over at Instapundit Glenn Reynolds asks the same questions I have been asking and comes up with the same answer (emphasis added):

JEFF JACOBY: Lawmakers, read the bills before you vote.

Hoyer conceded that if lawmakers had to carefully study the bill ahead of time, they would never vote for it. “If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,’’ he said. The majority leader was declaring, in other words, that it is more important for Congress to pass the bill than to understand it.

“Transparency’’ is a popular buzzword in good-government circles, and politicians are forever promising to transact the people’s business in the sunshine. But as Hoyer’s mirth suggests, when it comes to lawmaking, transparency is a joke. Congress frequently votes on huge and complex bills that few if any members of the House or Senate have read through. They couldn’t read them even if they wanted to, since it is not unusual for legislation to be put to a vote just hours after the text is made available to lawmakers. Congress passed the gigantic, $787 billion “stimulus’’ bill in February - the largest spending bill in history - after having had only 13 hours to master its 1,100 pages. A 300-page amendment was added to Waxman-Markey, the mammoth cap-and-trade energy bill, at 3 a.m. on the day the bill was to be voted on by the House. And that wasn’t the worst of it."

If companies that are “too big to fail” are too big to exist, then bills that are “too long to read” are too long to pass. This sort of behavior — passing bills that no one has read — or, that in the case of the healthcare “bill” haven’t even actually been written — represents political corruption of the first order. If representation is the basis on which laws bind the citizen, then why should citizens regard themselves as bound by laws that their representatives haven’t read, or, sometimes, even written yet?

Update - I posted this comment at Tigerhawk this morning:
According to Dr. James McHenry, at the close of the Constitutional Convention Dr. Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman “Well Doctor what have we got - a republic or a monarchy? A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.” It has always been a struggle to keep the Republic and our time is no different.

Should we pass laws or constitutional amendments so those elected to conduct the people’s business are forced to actually do it? What, exactly, do our congressional representatives think they were elected to do? Somehow, reading and understanding any bill they vote on would seem to be the least they could do. But as recent events have shown, it does not appear they can even rouse themselves to do that much.

Which brings us back to Glenn Reynold’s point – “If representation is the basis on which laws bind the citizen, then why should citizens regard themselves as bound by laws that their representatives haven’t read, or, sometimes, even written yet?” The answer is self-evident. The process of “keeping our Republic” has begun anew and the only question is how best to accomplish that goal.

I submit that it is not accomplished by petitioning our elected representatives to do their jobs.