Congress can’t be asked to read their own bills

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=50677

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the health-care reform bill now pending in Congress would garner very few votes if lawmakers actually had to read the entire bill before voting on 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,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.

In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.

There are no words.

Wait, yes there are.

If you can’t read a bill, you shouldn’t vote for it.

If you don’t want to read a bill, you should quit.

If individual Americans don’t have the opportunity to read the complete bill in its entirety before the vote, you shouldn’t vote for it.

How can you take responsibility for something you don’t understand?  How can you sleep at night knowing that you’re going to directly affect 300 million people with a vote in favor of an idea that someone else tells you is a good idea?  How do you know there’s not something horrifying hidden in legalese somewhere in that 1400-page bill that was completed three hours before the vote?

Why do we have 1400-page bills in the first place?

This is not representative government.  This is silliness.  There’s no way I can possibly take anybody seriously who laughs at the suggestion that reading and understanding legislation is a good idea.