No Way To Run A Country
I’ve complained about this before, and nothing changed. Complaining today won’t change anything either, but I think it warrants conversation.
The U.S. House has transparency rules, requiring a certain number of days to go by before they consider a piece of legislation. That’s so members have time to study it, and the public has time to comment on it. They agreed to waive those rules yesterday so a spending bill could get passed.
The U.S. Senate has similar rules. You guessed it, waived by unanimous consent.
Not that it much mattered…even with that amount of supposedly mandated time, I doubt many if any would have read the bill anyway. It came in at 5,593 pages. Let’s put that into context.
We all know what a ream of copy paper looks like, that wrapped bundle we fill our printers and copiers with. One ream is 500 sheets. That means in order to print one copy of the bill, you’d have to use nearly 12 reams of paper. That’s more than the standard case.
But, you say, we all know that bills have lots of wide margins and spacing. Fair enough. But even if we shorten the estimate by half, that’s nearly 3,000 pages.
Make it even easier. How long would it take you to read something that was even one ream of paper, 500 pages, worth? That’s more than most books printed these days. Bill O’Reilly’s latest “Killing” book, “Killing Crazy Horse”, comes in at only 320 pages…and you probably wouldn’t read that in one sitting, even though it’s a well written story. Imagine trying to read a spending bill, written in the best legalese we can muster.
So they play political games for six months, pass a bill that no one has read, and then go home for Christmas with news releases in their wake telling us what a great job they did.
You wouldn’t run your business that way. They wouldn’t let you run your business that way. But that is business as usual in Washington, and for that, they should all be ashamed.
