The Tiny Wings of Liberty

posted at 2:57 pm on January 27, 2010 by Doctor Zero
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New weapons are constantly added to the arsenal of liberty through the energy and creativity of free men. One such weapon is Twitter, the social networking service that limits users to posts of 140 characters or less. Twitter was instrumental during the recent protests against the Iranian government. It’s a town-hall meeting where everyone gets to speak, but every speech is timed with a chess clock.

I say it’s time for Americans to embrace this new technology, and use it to win their long struggle against the swelling size and cost of government. I propose a new law that would require all federal legislation to be written entirely through Twitter, at a cost to the individual congressmen and senators of one dollar per Tweet.

This would immediately reduce the size and complexity of federal legislation. Politicians who can’t be bothered to read thousand-page spending bills would hardly be willing to spend weeks Tweeting them 140 characters at a time. Anyone who’s tried following a busy Twitter conversation, built from an avalanche of little messages linked with hash tags, would shudder at the amount of effort required to follow the #ObamaCare stream.

My proposal would guarantee the legislative transparency that our formerly opaque President now says he desires. We’d have no trouble spotting the billions in pork-barrel spending slipped into bills by @robertbyrd and @chrisdodd. I’d suggest a ten-dollar surcharge and one-hour time limit for deleting regrettable Tweets. Actually, let’s make that fifteen minutes during budget reconciliation. That should keep things humming along. An engaged public would easily be able to follow the legislative process, as interesting line items were immediately Re-Tweeted by sharp-eyed followers.

Once we’ve got our politicians writing their own legislation through Twitter, we should be able to save tons of tax money by trimming bloated congressional staff. We’d also save money on the unholy amount of ink and paper it must take to print out those gigantic dead-tree spending bills.

The clarity and brevity of Twitter would bring discipline to the unruly minds of power-hungry politicians. It takes focus and skill to craft a coherent message in that merciless little Twitter window. I think the Founding Fathers would smile on a rule that says Washington can’t spend money on anything it can’t describe in 140 characters or less. For example: “USAF needs F-22 for future air superiority: $3.5 billion.” See? It works just fine for stuff that’s really important. We could achieve even greater fiscal restraint by requiring the dollar amounts to be fully written out, down to the last decimal place.

What about that dollar-per-Tweet charge? I’d be all in favor of allowing our representatives to tap into any available funding source… provided it was completely transparent, with the identity of contributors for each Tweet made public. Violation of this rule would be punished with immediate impeachment. Let’s see who stuffs those dollar bills into the cash machines mounted on the side of each congressperson’s computer terminal.

When the reconciliation process was complete, and the finished spending bill was ready to place on the President’s desk, all we’d have to do is print out the final Tweets… and have the President read and sign every single one of them.

I know there isn’t much time before the State of the Union address, but if the @totus account for the President’s teleprompter is online, it’s not too late to feed him this exciting proposal. President Obama has been building anticipation for a “hard pivot” to the economy, and apparently wants to reinvent himself as a deficit hawk. Perhaps limited government will instead arrive on the tiny blue wings of an electronic hummingbird.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Update: I forgot to mention my own Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/Doc_0.  Thus far, my efforts to use this account to write legislation have been ignored by Washington.

Update 2: I’ll be on Rusty Humphries’ show tonight after the State of the Union address.  We haven’t set the exact time yet, but Rusty wouldn’t mind if you listened to the whole show.  If you don’t get his program in your area, there’s a list of Internet streaming sites here.

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