New meme: Reading legislation is counterproductive

Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.  The often-misquoted finale to Thomas Gray’s Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College applies to Washington DC, where Politico reports that reading legislation and learning its contents actually is less productive than … ignorance.  In fact, Gray’s entire poem applies to the meme that shading one’s eyes to facts and education, including even elected officials and staffers, would find enlightenment through a lack of serious study:

Across the country, “Read the bill!” has become a rallying cry of the health care debate.

People are shouting it at town halls. Local newspapers teem with editorials and readers’ letters demanding that lawmakers do it. Bloggers and their commenters say the same. Politicians of both parties are taunting their foes across the aisle with it.

But reading actual legislative text is often the least productive way to learn what’s actually in a bill.

Consider the House health care bill (or bills, as it were). The 1,017-page text is a tangle of references to other clauses, sections and subsections of the bill as well as numerous other statutes — some passed ages ago, all a pain to locate and search, even online: “Section 1179 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1320d-8) is amended” by striking this and inserting that, or “the tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as a tax imposed by this chapter for the purposes of determining the amount of any credit under this chapter or for the purposes of section 55.”

Got that?

“These bills are not written for even the educated layperson. They are written for specialists,” said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers.

Even legislative staffers who deal with an issue every day can miss or fail to grasp the consequence of small turns of legislative language. “The legislative process is made up of people who are artisans at being able to craft language that looks innocuous” but isn’t, said Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who spent more than three decades as a high-level staffer on Capitol Hill.

The problem, as one correspondent put it in an e-mail, is that the laws don’t just apply to the so-called “specialists”.  They apply to all of us, which is why we elect citizens to Congress.  We expect them to know what is in those bills before voting on them.  The elected officials are the last line of defense for citizens from a federal bureaucracy that has a built-in impulse for overgrowth and the tyranny of bean-counters.

Victoria McGrane writes that an industry of advisers and consultants exist to walk politicians and staffers through complicated bills.  That includes the CBO, the CRS, staffers, outside advocacy groups, and perhaps even an army of Davids in the blogosphere.  However, she also notes that this process needs a lot of time to work.  The Obama administration’s effort to jam ObamaCare through Congress at breakneck speed would have effectively bypassed all of those processes and rendered Congress completely ignorant of ObamaCare’s actual impact — just as it did with cap-and-trade four weeks earlier.

This argument, in fact, calls into question the entire process of thousand-page bills that attempt to overhaul the private-sector economy.  If Congress can’t be expected to read the bill because it’s far too complicated, then maybe that means the effort is misguided from the start.  If a Congressman can’t comprehend the bill that would accomplish it, they probably can’t comprehend the economics they want to overhaul.  It would be better to leave the private sector in the hands of the consumers and producers in that case.

At the heart of the matter, Congress exists to ensure that bad laws do not get passed and that Americans keep their liberty, and that won’t happen as long as elected officials shirk their responsibilities on Capitol Hill.  Gray emphasized “Where ignorance is bliss,” in his impassioned poem against irresponsibility, and to some extent Utopianism.  It’s never folly to be wise, except when living in fantasies, which is exactly where HR3200 originated.

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