Friday, June 17, 2011

Federalist Paper #62 Warned Us of Incomprehensible Bills

The house and senate have each written bills so complicated, with thousands of pages, that you can fill rooms with the paper they are written on. The sheer volume of these bills makes reading them and understanding them, a daunting task. Combined with the way they are written, with this section referring to another section that removes sentence from another section, reading them becomes almost impossible. No wonder our elected officials in Congress scoffed when asked if they have read the bill. They haven't because they can't. If you have ever tried yourself to read these bills you will then understand.


Writing bills so that everyone can understand them, both for public and Congressman. The simpler the bill, the  easier it can be implemented and not subject to interpretation. It also makes it harder to include things that don't have anything to do with the original bill. We must require that our congressman write bills that are simple and easy to understand. If we do this everybody wins.




Founder and father of the Constitution James Madison warned us of such shenanigans in Federalist Paper #62 when he wrote: “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?”


Samuel Burns

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