Below The Beltway

USA Today points out why the call for all Members of Congress to read the full text of the health care reform bill, or any bill before Congress for that matter, wouldn’t really accomplish anything:

There’s a growing movement at town hall meetings and online to make sure members of Congress read the entire health care reform bill before they vote on it, and to make it available to the public at least 72 hours before a vote.

“Read the bill” is typically another way of saying “not so fast,” but there’s no denying the idea’s appeal. Too many bills have been rushed to a vote in Congress with too little time for scrutiny.

There’s just one hitch: You could read the entire health bill and still not have a very good idea of how the plan would work. Legislative language is notoriously, necessarily murky. Take the opening lines of one of the bill’s most controversial sections, the one about voluntary “end of life” counseling:

“SEC. 1233. ADVANCE CARE PLANNING CONSULTATION. (a) Medicare. — (1) IN GENERAL. — Section 1861 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395x) is amended — (A) in subsection (s)(2) — (i) by striking ‘and’ at the end of subparagraph (DD); (ii) by adding ‘and’ at the end of subparagraph (EE); and (iii) adding at the end the following new subparagraph: ‘(FF) advance care planning consultation (as defined in subsection (hhh)(1) … ”

Got that? Most members of Congress and most Americans could read all 1,017 pages of the House bill (to be fair, much of it isn’t quite this opaque) and come away with a confused picture about what it all means.

Radley Balko says that this is another argument for the kind of transparency that President Obama promised during the campaign, but has never delivered on:

This is another argument in favor of posting bills in their final form online for a considerable period of time before voting on them, or before they’re signed into law. Crowdsourcing by people who have experience wading through the parentheses and em-dashes might at least help decipher some of the mess to get a clearer picture of what it all means.

Perhaps. It’s certainly better than relying on biased Committee reports, the Congressional Research Service, or the media.

However, it’s clear that the real solution to the “read the bill” problem isn’t to make it easier to read the gargantuan 1,000+ page bills that have become a regular part of American government, but to make those types of bills far less common and far less necessary. And that will only happen when Congress stops doing things it shouldn’t be doing in the first place.

A quick glance at the powers actually granted to Congress by the Constitution makes it apparent that there’s absolutely no need for these mega-bills that nobody can read, and only lawyers and lobbyists can understand.