Why Politicians Don’t Read Bills

With a 1,000-page health care bill bouncing around Congress, Rep. John Conyers said this about the act of reading congressional legislation:

Yes, elected officials usually do not read the bills they pass or reject. As we know, many important bills have become law with little or no time for members of congress to vote on them, such as the USA Patriot Act, whose 241 pages were presented the same day as the the bill was to be debated. Three days later, it was law (not to mention a very far-reaching one).

Why is this the case? Three reasons:

1) As time passes, the federal legal system becomes more complex. Of course a bill from 2009 is going to be longer than a bill from 1989, simply because there are more laws now than there were before. The longer nature of newer bills reflects the best practice of eliminating loopholes and assuring that legislation is legally watertight.

2) The job of a congressperson is not to read bills. It is to represent the interests of a geographical region through a series of votes. These may sound the same, but they’re not. Consider this parallel: the job of a great film director is not to shoot individual frames, but to create experiences of interest to his or her audience. The director’s staff does the rest.

Similarly, a congressional staff (Conyer’s “lawyers”, for instance) are the ones who should be physically reading these bills and making sure that their boss’s vote is consistent with their boss’s positions. Their expertise should provide their boss with sufficient advice on what each bill contains and how to properly react to them.

3) There is no law requiring a buffer of time between a bill’s introduction and debate period. This is the root of the problem. When the congressional progress allows a bill to be presented the same day it goes up for debate, this process is inherently faulty. In some past cases it would be physically impossible for a congressperson’s staff to even get through a single reading before a debate would start.

One organization proposes a 72-hour window for review of bills. This seems fine for a minimum, but it seems a timeframe that varies depending on length of bill—72 hours for 200 pages but twice as much time for 400 pages, for example—would be most appropriate. After all, it takes longer to read one book than two. The process should reflect that.