What is Digg?105 Comments
- rjkominski, on 10/12/2007, -1/+35An effort I support whole heartedly.
- blapierre, on 10/12/2007, -1/+34@jotux
If it is not even humanly possible to read a bill then it shouldn't be passed! - moman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+27@jotux
"""source: www.llsdc.org/sourcebook/docs/CRS-96-727.pdf"""
I haven't bothered following your source and verifying its integrity for myself, but I'll give you the benifit of the doubt and work with your numbers.
"""Approximately 10,000 bills, and resolutions are introduced every year. Assuming each one is a minimum of 5 pages(they are of course longer), each page may have ~300 words, and the average reading rate of an adult to be 200 words per minute....that's 52 days of reading(156 work-days). Is it really viable to make them ready everything? That's why they have congressional aides."""
Yes it really is viable. Thats what the congress men and woman are being payed to do. 156 work days reading bills means 365 - 156 = 209 other days of the year spent doing other things congress does, like comittees stuff, campaining, and whatever else.
"""I'm not saying that it's OK that they don't read the bills...but you can't force them to sign an affidavit saying they've read everything, there is no way they can meet that requirement."""
Once again, they can easily meet the requirement by spending the 156 days reading the bills and quit complaining about it.
"""From the bill: "Bills will shrink, be less complicated, and contain fewer subjects, so that Congress will be able to endure hearing them read."
That is a little ridiculous in itself. Generally, laws are complicated because they try to cover all possible bases. The reason they are so complicated is because we have a long history of legal jargon to express clearly and thoroughly explain exactly what is implied and enacted by the law."""
Why all the unnecessary legal jargon and such. Where is the legal jargon in "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." (yes I realize this is from the Decleration of Independence). Laws should be simple enough to understand so that the common man can interpret them. Yes, the constitution guarantees legal council when charged, but I don't think it was the founding father's vision that our government should not enact laws which confuse the hell out of everyone. - SultanTravi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+27RTFB!
- tidu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+25I love these cocky-named bills. It would be insulting to anyone who would vote against this.
- agrabob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+19@tidu: Apparently our Congressmen love to insult themselves then!
I definatley support this bill, but have my doubts as to how many votes it will get. - blapierre, on 10/12/2007, -1/+18It is a sad state of affairs when it has come to needing to pass a "Read the Bills Act" to have people who vote on bills read what they are voting on. Of course there is no guarantee this bill will be read so who knows if it will be passed?
- Jolls, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16if you can't afford the time to read every bill that you pass, then you had better decrease the amount of bills. The massive number of bills and laws and budgets that get passed each year are mind boggling. We should be getting rid of laws and simplifying our government, not making it bigger and more cumbersome. sigh....
- themonkman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14@bobcrotch,
It's not about dumbing down bills. Many of the bills passed (all 10,000/yr) I'm sure are patently dumb if not insidious in nature. Why there are that many bills flying through Congress is absurd. Bills, like the Constitution, were always meant to be clear enough so that the average American can read them. How do you know if your being treated unjustly if you cannot even understand the laws as they are passed without a lawyer? Are you going to run to a lawyer and spend a pocket full of money every time you think that there is a possibility that a law is unjust? Of course not. We don't have the time nor the money for that. The job of Congress is to draft, review, vote on, and forward bills to the president in a fully informed manner. A summary from a congressional aide does not cut it. You read contracts fully before you sign them, right? Why should Congress do any less than what you and I do, especially when Laws are essentially contracts that rule over every man, woman, and child of the United States? - threedefenders, on 10/12/2007, -4/+17Read The Bill Act is the way to go. So many in Congress and in the Senate vote
without reading what they vote for. If they had read the bills they voted for, we as a
nation would not be in the poor shape we are now facing.
Thumbs up!! - monergism, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11How about drug tests and open financial statements for all legislators. FOIA should apply to public servants.
- folkler, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12Downsize DC has a brilliant plan to gradually bring the federal behemoth under control... The same way it got the way it is, one step at a time.
Join them, read their archives. They have a plan, and it doesn't involve Ross Perot type $$. It does require that we each do a little bit on a consistent basis... - moman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10@moman
gah! that last line should be:
but I don't think it was the founding father's vision that our government should enact laws which confuse the hell out of everyone.
didn't mean to have a double negative ;-) - bobcrotch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9I'm sorry but whats wrong with using a popular content site that is user driven to get your word out? If people don't like it and it's 'gaming' then it would get buried.
- DCdownsizer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Most people have no idea that their representatives aren't even able to read the text of the pages and pages of federal mandates they pass every year. Help reduce the size of government! Lobby your senators and congressman to pass the Read the Bills act at DownsizeDC.org!
- rEvolution3, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9Fundamental to democracy this is.
- janascii, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7This bill has been thrown around for a while, but I've never heard anything about it other than people supporting it and saying "this is how it should be." I really hope it starts to make some progress.
- kootnme, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7It is unfortunate it has to be legislated, but they certainly should at least know for what they vote. How to enforce? Will they simply stop reacting in surprise?
- Jorenko, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6For all you guys saying that it's not possible to read all the bills going through congress right now: RTFA! That's half the point! The bills going through congress right now are overcomplicated, amended at the last minute with piggyback issues, and there are just plain too many of them. Not only do we want accountability, but we also want fewer, more straight-forward bills.
- xXRUSHXx, on 10/12/2007, -5/+11We are a republic not a democracy. All Americans should know that !
- dankosaur, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Pop quizzes!
- geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5How about using wikipedia-style internet publishing minus the public edits? Wikipedia provides nice revision history - how about something like that so we know what was changed and who changed it.
- agrabob, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8Well, i did a little google search and:
http://www.downsizedc.org/blog/2007/mar/21/digging_as_hard_as_we_can
"As of right now, Digg has brought in nearly 200 newly registered DC Downsizers. And to everyone who has gone and there and "Dugg" us and posted a comment, THANK YOU."
WTF, i'm not saying there message is bad or not(ive had 2min to look at the site), but are they trying to use digg as a recruiting source? Reading that page I immediately got that "great, they're gaming digg" fealing. - officermcsmarty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5it would be a fine day if they'd read what they vote on in The House and The Senate, recent "we didn't know we let The Attorney General do that in the Patriot Act" antics not withstanding.
- Corrosionx, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7A "republic" is based on inalienable individual rights.
In a pure democracy, 50%+1 of electors can vote to kill you. Democracy has no limits to the whims of the masses. In a democracy, the government gives rights and take them away. - michaelfoley, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Wrong tack, this shouldn't be its own bill with its own title and vote, this should be a last minute amendment to another bill, take advantage of the fact that they don't read the bills to get this passed, then when the President signs it, whoever slipped it in stands up in the House and the Senate and yells Gotcha! and does a little touchdown dance for C-SPAN.
- dannybull, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I made it through half the article and then just dugg it....
- FresnoRog, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5OKAY THAT"S AWESOME!!!
- RonMoore, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4NEW YORK CITY READ THE BILLS MEETUP THIS MONDAY
Hey NY'ers. the NYC Read the Bills Meetup is this Monday 3/26 , 7:00 pm at Cafe Deville 103 Third Avenue (13th and 3rd two blocks from Union Square).
More Info:
http://rtba.meetup.com/12/
Hope to see you there.
ron@ManhattanLP.org - Corrosionx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@jotux: If it's not humanly possible for lawmakers to read the laws they pass, then how should it be possible for us to know what laws we must follow?
- way2muchsense, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5@themonkman - I think this effort should be restricted to "Members of Congress shall be afforded the opportunity to fully review each piece of legislation prior to it being brought to a vote." This was not done with the USA PATRIOT Act. The thing was about a bazillion pages long, mainly to prevent people from finding all the fascist goodies until long after the vote.
If members of Congress, particularly Democrats, were given an opportunity to actually review the PATRIOT Act prior to the vote, its many, many irregularities would have been exposed, and the "bipartisan" support wouldn't have been there. You either voted aye or voted nay to the whole clusterf***, and people weren't in the mood at the time to hear their member of Congress talk at great length about why they were opposing giving the police the Tools They Needed (TM) to go after terrorists. Things have changed since then, and now we're wondering why our Congress didn't review the damn thing before voting on it. Well, it was put together that way by the fascist bastards who wanted it passed with no questions asked so Bush (or rather his attorney general and his underlings) could wield the power of the Gestapo for however long a plurality of people would tolerate it.
So who's most to blame for these sorts of shenanigans? Not the Democrats. Not really. Sure, somebody could have stood up (I think Russ Feingold of Wisconsin actually did this) and said something like, "I'm not voting on this piece of s*** until my staff and I have had an opportunity to read through it," but in an environment where eight out of ten cars were sporting flag stickers, flag magnets, antenna flags, etc., it wouldn't have flown very far. No, it was the people who put this thing together, who put a few copies of it on a folding table and gave the opposition something like ten minutes to flip through it because it was just too f***ing top secret to allow anyone to haul a copy of it to their office for their staff to look at.
The leadership of each house can fix this easily by passing rules (which don't require the President's signature or even agreement between houses) affording everyone an opportunity to properly review every bill before it comes to a vote. Simple as that. Now that the Republicans have suddenly found their reading glasses after having been made the minority party, this rules change should be a slam dunk. - Oeberon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I imagine that the language in them is much simpler and more easily understood as a result. We should be so lucky! Instead we have been letting unelected bureaucrats create, write and, once Congress rubber-stamps them, enforce our laws.
We desperately need the Read the Bills Act. The RTBA, along with the Write The Laws Act and H.R. 500, will bring our federal government back under the control of those it is supposed to serve (WE the people) and allow us to begin eliminating the excess and waste that is rampantly out of control. - JcbAzPx, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5It would have been nicely ironic if they had passed this bill without reading it. Oh well.
It really is quite pathetic that they have to be forced to read the bills they vote on. - NSMike, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4RTFB, congress.
- polyGone, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Do you remember the the Colbert episode, where the guy who wanted to put the ten commandments on the wall of congress didn't even know what they all were?
- VicousT, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Ironically, the majority of people who digg this article will never read the Read The Bills Act themselves.
- geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I like thomas but it doesn't have the nice version history wikipedia has, perhaps it can be modified to include such a feature.
- polyGone, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3only our diggs do not control the lives of others.....
- PhireN, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Your politicians don't read the bills they pass, thats crazy. Here in New Zealand, all bills get read out loud not once, but 3 times, before the final vote.
- willers32, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It seems to me that the ONLY job a Congressperson is required to do under the Constitution is to write and READ bills, and then vote on them. If they are not reading the bills, how are they spending their time? Obviously not doing their jobs.
I have heard that when the USA PATRIOT act was passed not one member of either house had read the bill. It was written by a Vietnamese immigrant working in the Justice Department, then submitted to Congress in the middle of the night. Party leaders in both houses rushed it through without debate. (At least Congressman Ron Paul (R. Texas) had the guts to vote NO. He's now running for President.)
When the author was asked where he obtained the legal basis for the provisions in the bill his response was "The Divine Right of Kings to rule their subjects."
Wasn't the American Revolution specifically targeted at abolishing the Divine right of kings, at least here in the USA?
It was this particular incident which inspired the Read the Bills Act. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4ya so many just introduce bills they NEVER EVEN WROTE, NEVER EVEN READ that some lobbyist gave them...
with deceptive names..
this is a great idea, should keep bills smarter - GrooveStix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Very interesting. Here's a reply I got:
Dear *****:
Thank you for contacting me to express your support for the
"Read the Bills Act". I appreciate hearing from you.
The legislation you refer to has not been introduced in either the
House or the Senate. You may be interested to know that current House
Rules provide for a three day period for all legislation, which is intended
to give Members a chance to review the details of a bill prior to voting
on it. However, a simple majority is required to waive this rule.
Republicans have used their majority to waive the three day period
during consideration of some of the most important, lengthy and
expensive bills considered during the 109th Congress, including the 394-
page pension reform legislation, which was introduced and passed on the
same day; and the $39-billion budget reconciliation bill, which was
rushed through the House and Senate so quickly that a significant error in
the text of the bill was not discovered until after the bill had been signed
into law by the President. When the rules are waived, Members
sometimes only have hours to review these lengthy bills and conference
reports.
Therefore, I am a cosponsor of H. Res. 688, legislation
introduced by Congressman Brian Baird (D-WA) which would require
that legislation and conference reports be made available for 72 hours
before consideration by the House. Unfortunately this legislation did not
pass before the 109th Congress adjourned. Rest assured I will keep your
views in mind should similar legislation be introduced during the 110th
Congress.
Again, thank you for being in touch. For news on current federal
legislative issues, please visit my website at www.house.gov/dingell; you
can also sign up there to receive my e-newsletter. In the meantime,
please do not hesitate to contact me again if I may be of assistance with
this or any other matter of concern.
With every good wish,
Sincerely yours,
John D. Dingell
Member of Congress - macinpcusr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The Congressmen being able to read the legislation is vital to Democracy. Them reading the bills is in their own hands. If a bill is written and is full of jargon that cannot be understood by the representative voting on it, it is useless.
- mclumber1, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Drug tests are invasive and immoral. This is coming from someone who doesn't do drugs!
- mhoutz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3great idea, at least let's get this to a vote in congress so we can see who is on the side of our nation's people and who is on the side of bureaucracy and corporatism.
- bwalton, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It is clear that the current system is not working to preserve our liberty. The RTBA act would certainly be a small step in the right direction, even if all it does is slow things down a bit. It is hard to argue against requiring our legislators to at least read the tyranny they foist upon us. Maybe there should also be a requirement along the lines that all the federal laws together should fit in the pages of a normal-sized book (in normal-sized type, etc). Then perhaps everyone could read them all.
- blapierre, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Link?
- aceat64, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Sounds like a good idea to me, I sent in my letters (and if I can remember too might even call). This looks like a step in the right direction, I hope everyone on digg (in the US that is) takes the time to send in their e-mails.
- willcoll, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I was disgusted to find out some of the laws passed were not even read. I hope this passes
- bernieg1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Perhaps our Founding Fathers never expected that our country would need 10,000 bills a year passed. The solution seems to be to limit the amount of bills down to 365 a year. Perhaps then we wouldn't have needless bills such as "Arkansas recognizes Hog Yaller Day" or "California Safe Orange Pit Removal Procedure Bill" and all the worthless other nonsense that goes on. If Congress had to choose only one bill to vote on each day, it would be possible to read each bill, understand it, and in the end hopefully only the truly important bills would pass.
Throw this in with all the other bills being voted on. Who knows?
BTW, of course I did not read the entire article, who has time? -
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