{"id":15432,"date":"2020-12-23T08:43:24","date_gmt":"2020-12-23T13:43:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=15432"},"modified":"2020-12-25T08:27:35","modified_gmt":"2020-12-25T13:27:35","slug":"covid-bailout-proves-congress-is-unfit-to-govern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/23\/covid-bailout-proves-congress-is-unfit-to-govern\/","title":{"rendered":"Covid Bailout Proves Congress is Unfit to Govern"},"content":{"rendered":"

USA Today, December 23, 2020<\/h2>\n

11th-hour COVID-19 relief deal proves again that Congress is unfit to govern<\/a><\/h1>\n
by James Bovard<\/div>\n
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“In politics, stupidity is not a handicap,\u201d Napoleon reputedly said more than two centuries ago. Boundless ignorance is also not a handicap, as Congress demonstrated Monday night by approving a 5,593-page bill <\/a>with no time to read it.\u00a0The usual suspects are indignant at the sloppy procedures propelling $2.3 trillion in federal spending<\/a>, including a last-minute $900 billion deal for COVID-19 relief. But reckless legislating has been standard procedure on Capitol Hill for almost three decades.<\/p>\n

Democratic Sen. David Boren of Oklahoma\u00a0observed in 1991 that<\/a>\u00a0congressional \u201cbills are five times longer on the average than they were just as recently as 1970, with a far greater tendency to micromanage every area of government.\u201d<\/p>\n

Conservatives were outraged, and a Republican Leadership Task Force proclaimed in 1993:<\/a>\u00a0\u201cA bill that cannot survive a 3-day scrutiny of its provisions is a bill that should not be enacted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Republicans captured control of Congress the following year, but that did not deter House Speaker Newt Gingrich and President Bill Clinton from jamming a 4,000-page, 40-pound agreement <\/a>through Congress\u00a0in 1998. Legendary \u201cKing of Pork\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia\u00a0declared,<\/a> \u201cOnly God knows what\u2019s in this monstrosity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Decades of unread Pandora’s boxes<\/h2>\n

During the George W. Bush era, legislative ignorance became a point of patriotic pride.\u00a0<\/strong>Shortly before the 2006 congressional elections,\u00a0Congress rubber-stamped the Bush team’s\u00a0barbaric interrogation wish list<\/a>\u00a0as part of the Military Commissions Act. As Boston Globe columnist Peter Canellos put it, “because of the Bush administration’s restrictive policy on sharing classified information with Congress, very few of the people engaged in the debate will know what they’re talking about<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0Republican\u00a0Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, President Donald Trump\u2019s first attorney general, boasted, \u201cI don\u2019t know what the CIA has been doing, nor should I know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Retroactively legalizing torture, as the bill did, was a nonissue on Capitol Hill<\/strong>.Legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick declared<\/a>, \u201cWe’ve reached a defining moment in our democracy when our elected officials are celebrating their own blind ignorance as a means of keeping the rest of us blindly ignorant as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Democrats captured control of Congress in 2006, Sen. Barack Obama\u00a0and several other members\u00a0endorsed requiring that all bills be available online for at least 72 hours<\/a> before Congress voted on it. But that provision was not included in the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0Politico hailed as<\/a> \u201csweeping ethics reform legislation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nine years later, Politico said\u00a0the same law <\/a>had \u201ccreated an entire class of professional influencers who operate in the shadows, out of the public eye and unaccountable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our View:<\/strong>Deal reached after corrosive politics left Americans feeling abandoned<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The Obama administration\u2019s 2,700-page<\/a> Affordable Care Act was another unread Pandora\u2019s box. As\u00a0House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers<\/a>\u00a0asked in 2009, as the House was rushing to pass the ACA, “What good is reading the bill if it\u2019s a thousand pages and you don\u2019t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?\u201d<\/p>\n

Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del.,\u00a0later said of the health bill<\/a>: \u201cI don’t expect to actually read the legislative language, because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I’ve ever read in my life.\u201d\u00a0But not nearly as confusing as the blizzard of new mandates that private insurance companies were forced to obey.<\/p>\n

In the 2010 congressional elections,\u00a0Republicans pledged to “ensure that bills are debated and discussed<\/a> in the public square by publishing the text online for at least three days before coming up for a vote in the House of Representatives.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>They won the House but that didn\u2019t stop them from quickly\u00a0cutting a budget deal with President Obama<\/a>and rushing it\u00a0<\/a>through Congress before members could\u00a0read or digest it.<\/p>\n

Three years later, Congress enacted a 1,200-page, $560 billion<\/a>National Defense Authorization Act<\/a>\u00a0that was only available to members 36 hours prior to their vote<\/a>. When asked whether members of Congress had read the bill, Virginia\u00a0Rep. Jim Moran, replied<\/a>, \u201cOf course not. Are you kidding?\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>Moran said he felt no obligation to read the text because \u201cI trust the leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n

Legislative ignorance is rampant<\/h2>\n

There have been plenty of \u201cscale-buster\u201d pieces of legislation enacted without reading since then, usually accompanied by sporadic media whining about the process. But as I’ve written before<\/a>, gross negligence is a defining feature, not a bug, of contemporary lawmaking. Most politicians\u2019 love of power will always exceed their intellectual curiosity.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cYou can lead\u00a0a man to Congress, but you can\u2019t make him think,\u201d quipped Milton Berle<\/a>. Or read.\u00a0According to a 1977 survey of House members, the average member of Congress\u00a0spent only 11 minutes a day reading at work<\/a>.That survey result was so embarrassing that it has not been repeated.<\/p>\n

Congress has its own legislative research agencies as well as instant access to\u00a0thousands of reports regularly produced by other federal agencies.\u00a0But former 10-term GOP\u00a0Rep.\u00a0Cliff Stearns<\/a>\u00a0of Florida\u00a0admitted that a lot of federal reports \u201care so overwhelming that I didn\u2019t generally look at them.\u201d One longtime congressional staffer told The Washington Post in 2014 that \u201cwe used them as doorstops<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Legislative ignorance is treacherous in part because there is no Hippocratic oath \u2014\u00a0\u201cfirst, do no harm\u201d \u2014\u00a0on Capitol Hill.\u00a0Because politicians won an election, they often act entitled to dictate rules on anything and everything under the sun. T<\/strong>he latest bill contains a blizzard of laws, penalties\u00a0and handouts that will take months to decipher.\u00a0The news media will be exposing horror stories from the bill long after congressional leaders finish their victory lap.<\/p>\n

Fantasizing about reforms that could create wiser legislators simply paves the way to bigger boondoggles down the road. The latest blockbuster bill is another warning that know-nothing, no-fault legislating will be the death of our republic unless Americans can severely reduce Congress\u2019\u00a0prerogative to meddle in their lives.<\/strong><\/p>\n

James Bovard, author of “Attention Deficit Democracy<\/a>,” is a member of USA TODAY\u2019s Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter:\u00a0@JimBovard<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

USA Today, December 23, 2020 11th-hour COVID-19 relief deal proves again that Congress is unfit to govern by James Bovard “In politics, stupidity is not a handicap,\u201d Napoleon reputedly said more than two centuries ago. Boundless ignorance is also not a handicap, as Congress demonstrated Monday night by approving a 5,593-page bill with no time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14923,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[415,15,2349,1706,38,1965,727],"class_list":["post-15432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-boondoggle","tag-congress","tag-covid","tag-newt-gingrich","tag-obama","tag-robert-byrd","tag-spending"],"yoast_head":"\nCovid Bailout Proves Congress is Unfit to Govern - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/23\/covid-bailout-proves-congress-is-unfit-to-govern\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Covid Bailout Proves Congress is Unfit to Govern - James Bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"USA Today, December 23, 2020 11th-hour COVID-19 relief deal proves again that Congress is unfit to govern by James Bovard “In politics, stupidity is not a handicap,\u201d Napoleon reputedly said more than two centuries ago. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15432"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15435,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15432\/revisions\/15435"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}