The 'Read the Bill' Movement

by Bruce WebbRepublican obstructionists to Obama's programme have developed a new tactic. Seemingly absent-minded of how Republican majorties jammed through enormous bills without letting Dems actually read them, they now insist that every Dem has to read every small piece of every bill and additional specially the Health Care Bill. Well in realism that is not that much of a challenge. Behold a typical page of legislation:If you click on the image to expand it you will see that is is is quite large print, is double spaced, and much indented. Moreover large parts of it are clear boiler plate, essential to get the exact language in the following U.S. Code correct, but chiefly not essential to get the sense correct. I do not mean that you do not need to read bill language carefully, but it is not like reading a 1000 page bill is the equivalent of reading War and Peace.This sample is from the Senate HELP bill which is 175 pages long. Why is it consequently much shorter than the House version? Because it only covers the policy components of establishing the benefits package and administering the Exchange, the bulk of the bill is taken up with various tax provisions, important yes but not consequently much consequently that you can't evaluate the policy options without them. Lets look at the book of HR3200 as introduced.http://edlabor.house.gov/documents/111/pdf/publications/AAHCA-BillText-071409.pdfOn page 2 we see that the bill is alienated into Division A - Affordable Health Care Choices and Division B - Medicare and Medicaid Improments. Division A takes up the first 215 pages while Division B takes up the remaining 803.I am not proverb that Division B is not important otherwise that it doesn't have some controversial pieces, but chiefly it is tinkering with programs that by now exist, the real policy innovations are in Division A. And if we look at that we see that it is alienated into four Titles. Title 1 - Protections and Standards for Qualified Benefit Plans, Title 2 - Health Insurance Exchange and Related Provisions, Title 3 - Shared Responsibility, and Title 4 -Amendments to the Internal Revenue Code. Of the 215 pages Title 1 takes up pg. 5-71, Title 2 pg. 72-143, Title 3 pg. 143-167. Even at that much of the material is administrative otherwise spelling out specific language changes to current alive code.The Republicans are going to try to make hay out of this 'Have you read the bill' message and to laugh at Obama's offer to take people through the bill "line by line" but there is nothing that pathetic about it. Because most of the meat is concentrated in just a small number of sections in Division A, a couple of hours of meeting otherwise browsing is almost certainly enough to get the average Congressman up to speed on this legislation. In fact the biggest frustration is that while the pages are numbered there are no page keys to translated Section numbers to pages, but apart from for that this is not that difficult a read.When people make the claim that no single can really understand a 1018 page bill realize that chiefly you do not need to deeply engage with additional than maybe seventy otherwise eighty double spaced, highly concave pages to get a pretty solid grasp of what the bill proposes.
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