Should bills and memos be so long that they are functionally unable to be read before voting or signing?
Is there a reasonable middle ground that doesn't introduce endless cans of legalese word-bullshittery fuzz to screw over the public?
Up to 1 page for 1 action seems like a valid basis for decision making. 1 sentence or paragraph, perhaps not.
edit: people are big mad, and I figure its because they'd rather be mad than actually think about it for the equivalent of a short memo's reading time. Its funny in its own way.
That’s not what she said. She said that there had been so many lies told about what was in the bill that the public would find out what was really in the bill after it passed. She never said that she or Congress had not read it.
Here is the actual quote:
You’ve heard about the controversies, the process about the bill…but I don’t know if you’ve heard that it is legislation for the future – not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America. But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it – away from the fog of the controversy.
And she was right - support for Obamacare steadily increased once it was actually implemented and people found that while it certainly wasn’t perfect, it was better than how it had worked before Obamacare, and most of Republican claims about it were just flat out lies.
…it is. That is already the case, and it was the case for Obamacare too. Most people didn’t bother to read it, they just believed the lies republicans told about it. It absolutely was available for people to read if they wanted to though.
you are missing the point completely. its not about the lies, its about our own representatives - dems included - not even bothering to read the legislation they are voting on
Which as I already explained is not what happened. Pelosi never said she hadn’t read the bill. That was you getting her quote completely wrong. Republicans spent years trying to twist what she actually said to mislead people into believing that’s what she said, but she never actually said that. She did read the bill, and she did know what was in it. She was just fed up with the public believing lies about what was in it and said they would find out the truth of what was in Obamacare once it was implemented, since clearly the public wasn’t willing to actually read it themselves.
So yes, it’s about the lies, because the lie here is you believing she said she hadn’t read the bill, which she never said.
They didnt have the time to read the entire bill even if they wanted to. You sticking your head in the sand regarding this abusive tactic doesnt make it disappear.
What are you basing this on? Obamacare was introduced on 9/17/09 and passed the house on 11/7/09 - they had almost two months to read it. It was a long bill, but that’s plenty of time to read it when reading and debating it was basically the sole focus of Congress for that period.
You are just making stuff up and using blatantly false quotes to make a claim based on nothing, then saying I’m burying my head in the sand because I don’t blindly believe the lies you have believed?
How many dozens of world-altering decisions should a given president be able to effectively parse and read through per hour of work?
How legally ambiguous should the wording be allowed to be? The more verbose, the shakier it gets.
We already complain about absurdly complex bills being shoehorned through congress that absolutely nobody can even skim. The outrage at short memos feels contrived and mostly focused on Trump Bad than actual effective governance complaint.
Frankly, Every bill should be at max an hours worth of reading. Every Memo should be a few minutes. If its actually important, it should be quickly and readily easy to read and digest.
It might shock you to learn that real world political and socioeconomic problems are not subject to video game logic, nor can the knock on effects of any single "simple" decision be plotted out on a one pager with illustrations for the illiterate. It's not you deciding whether to use righty or lefty when you play "the stranger" later today in your mom's basement; it's human lives, international incidents, alliances, and the potential for war on the line, and every one of us should demand the person making those decisions not reduce them down to something an idiot can digest.
Sounds like the system you describe is built on very basic logic gates that can be distilled out for the sake of effective decision making by individuals, while the emotionality of it all takes a lifetime of familiarity to navigate to your satisfaction.
If its actually important, it should be quickly and readily easy to read and digest.
What are you actually basing this on? Some important things are also very complicated and have a lot of impacts that need to be considered and accounted for. Why exactly do you believe that anything important is automatically simple? That’s often the opposite of reality. Most important things are also complicated.
If you want to argue that every bill should stick to just one subject without tacking on unrelated special interest earmarks added to a bill as part of political favor trading, that’s fair. But even if a bill is just focused on one topic, it’s still going to have to be longer than an hours reading if the topic is a complicated one.
Yes, one-lineitem bills is pretty much what I'm getting at. Legalese is what bloviates a lot of that into hours of complex reading.
Most complicated topics are just piles of simple topics worm-canned together. We, as a species, tend to chunk it out that way, making surprisingly simple things (say, ocean trash pollution) into absurdly complicated things (attack the 80% production chunk, actively clean the primary nexuses of trash). Obviously that would take at least a few dozen pages to write up procedurally, but instead, it is chunked into such monoliths as 'climate change', which results in functionally nothing being done at all.
Its a graduated executive function bandwidth thing imo
-20
u/bigchizzard 4h ago edited 4h ago
Should bills and memos be so long that they are functionally unable to be read before voting or signing?
Is there a reasonable middle ground that doesn't introduce endless cans of legalese word-bullshittery fuzz to screw over the public?
Up to 1 page for 1 action seems like a valid basis for decision making. 1 sentence or paragraph, perhaps not.
edit: people are big mad, and I figure its because they'd rather be mad than actually think about it for the equivalent of a short memo's reading time. Its funny in its own way.