Democratic senator: Of course I'm not going to read the ObamaCare bill

A fascinating moment of candor captured by CNS, ostensibly offered as proof that Carper’s lazy but actually much more troubling than that. If this were a simple case of a senator showing disinterest in his work, the problem’s easily solved: Vote him out and get a new senator. The thing is, he’s right about legislative language being incomprehensible, especially when, as in the case of ObamaCare, the subject matter has to be reconciled with so many other provisions of existing commercial law. Essentially, it’s an endless labyrinth of cross-referencing other statutes; you’d have to have the entire U.S. Code in front of you to follow the language accurately (or, better yet, a point-and-click version on the Internet) and even then your eyes would glaze over in short order from trying to keep track of it all. Point being, federal law long ago reached the point of bloat and bureaucracy where even legislators can’t digest it. The most they can do is trust the staffers who actually write the stuff to harmonize it well enough that unintended consequences are kept to a minimum. How you address that problem — starting with the tax code, natch — I have no idea.