This seems logical, and yet bills with sweeping consequences, sometimes numbering in the hundreds of pages, are printed when there is no time for anyone to read the bill, let alone intelligently consider it, before voting. Constitution-bending pieces of legislation have been bullied into passage with a lot of noise about how we can't wait to pass it, even though we have to live with the consequences for years after it is passed. This is how the Patriot Act was passed, for instance.
Require Legislators to Read and Understand Legislation before Voting on it.
Tags: legislation
Comments (6)
Wouldn't it be great to require legislators to sign an affidavit swearing under penalty of perjury that they've read fully and understand the bill prior to voting? I think they'd have to amend the Constitution first before we could demand impeachment or prosecution for perjury. Heh, heh...
If this were already in place, we wouldn't be saddled with the Patriot Act. This is another one of those incredibly simple ideas that Congress doesn't seem to like; if they were to vote on it today, how would your representative vote? For or against? It says a lot about us as a people that we are so reluctant to make simple, no-nonsense changes.
Please join DownsizeDC to push this idea forward faster, they've been pushing the Read the Bills Act for a few years now, and the more people who use their system of contacting congress, the more likely this bill will pass. While there, read about the Write the Bills Act and the One Subject at a Time Act, too.
I think we can attack these problems from other fronts...see comments to the effect of One Idea, One Bill or Stop Pork, etc.
From DownsizeDC:
Our goal is to constantly grow larger and stronger in order to...
* Exert relentless, overwhelming, resistance numbing pressure on Congress
* Make our ideas heard by everyone, everywhere, every day
* Attract opportunistic politicians who will want to march in front of our Big Parade
Achieving these goals will Downsize DC. We know of no other way to do the job...
* You can't win a political contest if you're outnumbered
* You can't win an argument if your voice isn't heard
So we keep pushing on these essential things in our relentless way. The result in May was more progress...
* We bombarded Congress with 36,512 messages, exceeding what we did in April by 4,782
* 610 new people registered to use our Educate the Powerful System (this one is down from 710 last month)
* We recruited 424 net new members, as opposed to 302 net new members in April
* Net growth for the year now stands at 1,079
* The Downsize DC Army now stands at 25,428
* It took us 176 days to grow from 24,000 to 25,000, but now we've grown nearly 43% of the way from 25k to 26k in just 31 days.
The more who join and use the system to contact Congress the stronger will be our voice to make Congress behave Constitutionally, if every one who believes government has gotten far too big, too intrusive and far too controlling would join DownsizeDC we'd win against the Big Government proponents. There really are more of us, but too few of us actually try to do anything about stopping the growth and unbearable nosiness of government, but Downsize DC makes it so easy to do something. It takes less than 2 minutes to send a message to Congress once you are signed up. So please sign up.
i agree with pjwg