Nobody reads bills, but only some of us get to have opinions on them

Like so many of you, I was stunned to find out that the COVID stimulus package passed by Congress was nearly 5,600 pages long and given to legislators with no time to read that much material. How could anyone know what was in the bill? Except, of course, the people who wrote it, who are presumably congressional aides. Or perhaps House elves.

I realize that bills are made through a process of negotiation, and then the parties involved in the negotiation could tell other parties what was in the bill, thus helping people know what it does, but what if those parties lie? What if the negotiations are conducted in bad faith? Surely, in that case, the major problem is the length in the bill, not that people are regularly lying to each other about what they're putting in the bill.

Look, I don't want a discussion about a huge national crisis and the many-pronged effort to relieve it to become complicated. I just want to ask a simple question: How can legislators form an opinion about this bill without reading it? What are they supposed to do, have the people that wrote the bill summarize it for them? Who does that?

I'll tell you who does that—political reporters and bloggers. I read several of them, and because I feel they adequately summarize the bill and what it contains, I believe I can form strong, educated opinions. The legislators who hear the same summaries as the reporters, but in more detail, obviously cannot.

It's that simple.

#politics #deepthoughts