The illiterate U.S. Congress

In case you missed it last week, a few stories made news stations which told what many American’s already knew-that members of Congress do not read the legislation they are attempting to make into law.

Where this sudden “enlightenment”, last week, about members of Congress not actually reading the bills they are supposed to sign into law came from I don’t know, but it can perhaps be traced back to an interview conducted last Friday with Senator Thomas Carper, a Democrat out of Delaware.

In this interview, Carper states that, in commission, bills are written in “plain English” (i.e. laymen’s terms), but when they come up for vote they are written in “legislative language. Amongst his many comments while discussing what is apparently health care legislation, he goes on to say that he understood little to nothing of the verbiage of the bill as it was written for law, and believes that no one else could understand it either. He also implies that he doesn’t believe anyone who says they can understand these bills-as they are written before Congress-is lying to themselves and anyone who asks them directly. In case you don’t believe me, you can find the portion of the interview which I reference here: http://michellemalkin.com/2009/10/02/democrat-sen-tom-carper-read-the-bill-are-you-kidding-me/.

Of course, this begs me to ask a lot of questions such as Why are our members of Congress not able understand “legislative language”? Isn’t this the job we have hired them for?; and How do they expect anyone to be able to obey, follow and enforce a law which they themselves do not understand?; or If legislative language is so hard to understand, why are bills written in it to begin with?

Further, if our Congress is writing legislation in a manner which they can’t understand themselves, then isn’t it a natural assumption that these people aren’t qualified to do the job we have hired them for and, even more importantly, fail to understand the job which they are supposed to do?; and Why aren’t they simply written in the “plain English” under which they are originally written in while in committee?

(This last question could possibly be answered by saying “it’s for legal purposes and enforcement”, to which I would say bull shit: If there is a law that says “you can’t pee on the side of a public building”, there are no legal or enforcement justifications for why those 10 simple words are rewritten into 30 confusing ones for the adoption of the law. In fact, the only reason I can think of is that legislatures intentionally write these laws so that the vast majority of people cannot understand them. Why this would be, I can only suppose and form conjecture on, but seeing as how there is no other logical reason for our national, state and local laws to be written in such a confusing manner, I am left with no other explanation than that it is done intentionally so that government corruption can always exist in a manner which is hard at best, and impossible at worst, to discover and eliminate).

Of all the questions I could pose, the most troubling to me is assumption to be drawn about our elected officials’ ability to do their job. It’s a serious assumption that deserves to be addressed: if Congress doesn’t even understand these bills as they are written, how can we assume that they even understand the basic requirements of their job?

One thing that must be clarified is that this isn’t restricted to just those members of Congress who are Democrats; it is obvious that Republicans (and the lone Independent) have this problem too-otherwise, why would we have proposed legislation like H.R. 3200 (i.e. Obamacare) proposed by John Dingle of Michigan make it out of a bipartisan committee?

As it just so happens, unlike most-including, apparently, our members of Congress-I can understand “legislative language”, this of course doesn’t help those who can’t because even in the effort of explaining these pieces of legislation to people, important aspects of them are lost; and despite those earlier posed questions this all leads to the most important ones of all: How is it that we, the American public, the ones who are supposed to live and conform to these various laws and legislative members; how is it that we have not only allowed ourselves to elect Representatives and Senators who fail to understand the laws they have written but also allowed so many of them to stay in office for so many years?