{"id":15936,"date":"2021-05-05T10:38:48","date_gmt":"2021-05-05T14:38:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=15936"},"modified":"2021-05-05T10:49:37","modified_gmt":"2021-05-05T14:49:37","slug":"congress-still-unfit-govern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2021\/05\/05\/congress-still-unfit-govern\/","title":{"rendered":"Congress Is Still Unfit to Govern"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

photo copyright James Bovard 2021<\/p><\/div>\n

Congress Is Still Unfit to Govern<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/h2>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

\u201cIn politics, stupidity is not a handicap,\u201d Napoleon is reputed to have said more than two centuries ago. Boundless ignorance is also not a handicap, as Congress demonstrated last December by approving a 5593-page bill without reading it. Plenty of activists and editorial pages howled over the sloppy procedures propelling $2.3 trillion in new federal spending.<\/p>\n

James Madison warned in the Federalist Papers in 1788 that \u201cit will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.\u201d Madison referred to the peril of excessive legislation; he may have never imagined that Congress would routinely enact thousand-page blockbusters without reading the text. But that is now standard procedure in Washington.<\/p>\n

On the night of the day before Thanksgiving 1991, the House of Representatives approved a 1400-page highway bill \u2014 even though almost no member of the House had seen the bill and only one copy was available in the House chamber. Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.) observed at the time that congressional \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 Conservatives were outraged, and a Republican Leadership Task Force proclaimed in 1993, \u201cA bill that cannot survive a three-day scrutiny of its provisions is a bill that should not be enacted.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Bill Clinton railroaded a 972-page crime bill into law in 1994, Republicans saw the legislation only a few hours before the vote. That was irrelevant because Clinton proclaimed that it was \u201cthe will of God\u201d that Congress speedily pass the bill. Clinton\u2019s bill created dozens of new criminal offenses and opened a $10 billion subsidy spigot for local and state prison building that sent America\u2019s incarceration rate skyrocketing in the late 1990s and early 2000s.<\/p>\n

Willful ignorance<\/strong><\/p>\n

Republicans captured control of Congress in the 1994 elections. But that did not deter House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Clinton from jamming a 4000-page, 40-pound agreement down Congress\u2019s throat in 1998. No one had a chance to read the bill before voting. Legendary \u201cKing of Pork\u201d Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) declared, \u201cOnly God knows what\u2019s in this monstrosity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shortly after the 9\/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration strong-armed the 342-page USA PATRIOT Act through Congress. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) complained that \u201cthe bill wasn\u2019t printed before the vote.\u201d Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, declared, \u201cWe are now debating at this hour of night, with only two copies of the bill that we are being asked to vote on available to Members on this side of the aisle.\u201d Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the longest-serving member of the House, said the process was \u201cdenigrating basic constitutional rights, and I find it to have been done in a sneaky, dishonest fashion.\u201d Regardless of the legislative travesty, Bush and Barack Obama routinely invoked Congress\u2019s passage of the PATRIOT Act to justify their anti-terrorism policies.<\/p>\n

During the George W. Bush era, legislative ignorance became a point of patriotic pride<\/strong>. Shortly before the 2006 congressional elections, Congress rushed to rubber-stamp a Bush administration barbaric interrogation wish-list part of the Military Commissions Act. The Boston Globe reported that \u201cbecause of the Bush administration\u2019s restrictive policy on sharing classified information with Congress, very few of the people engaged in the debate will know what they\u2019re talking about.\u201d Fewer than 50 members of Congress knew what actual interrogation methods were being debated, according to the Globe. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Trump\u2019s first attorney general, boasted, \u201cI don\u2019t know what the CIA has been doing, nor should I know.\u201d Retroactively legalizing torture, as the bill did, was a non-issue on Capitol Hill. Legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick declared, \u201cWe\u2019ve 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 the Democrats captured control of Congress in the 2006 elections, several members, including Sen. Barack Obama, endorsed requiring that any legislative proposal be available and online for at least 72 hours before Congress voted on it. But that provision was not included in the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, which Politico hailed as \u201csweeping ethics reform legislation.\u201d Nine years later, Politico derided that same law as \u201cthe lobbying reform that enriched Congress,\u201d noting that it \u201ccreated an entire class of professional influencers who operate in the shadows, out of the public eye and unaccountable.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Obama administration\u2019s 2700-page Affordable Care Act was another unread Pandora\u2019s box. The bill was almost 400,000 words long; within four years, the Obama administration would issue more than 10 million words of regulations to enforce it. This time Conyers scoffed at members of Congress who \u201cget up and say, \u2018Read the bill.\u2019 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 Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) later explained, \u201cI don\u2019t expect to actually read the legislative language, because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I\u2019ve ever read in my life.\u201d But not nearly as confusing as the blizzard of new mandates that private companies were forced to obey.<\/p>\n

The law sparked widespread outrage, spurring many congressmen to cancel all public meetings with their constituents that summer. At a Montana forum in August 2010, a retired nurse asked Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who boasted that he wrote much of the Affordable Care Act, whether he read the health-care bill before it was passed. Baucus replied, \u201cI don\u2019t think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the health-care bill. You know why? It\u2019s statutory language. We hire experts.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the 2010 congressional elections, Republicans campaigned on a \u201cPledge to America\u201d to \u201censure that bills are debated and discussed 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 Republicans captured control of the House but that didn\u2019t stop Republican congressional leaders a few months later from cutting a deal with Obama and rushing a 459-page budget deal through Congress, leaving members time neither to read nor to digest it before approving it.
\nDoorstops<\/p>\n

Three years later, in December 2014, Congress enacted a 1200-page, $560 billion National Defense Authorization Act that was available to members only 36 hours prior to their vote. When asked whether members of Congress had read the bill, Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) replied, \u201cOf course not. Are you kidding?\u201d Moran explained that he felt no obligation to read the text because \u201cI trust the leadership.\u201d Later that month, members of Congress heaved all their unfinished work into a 15-pound lump of paper which no one had time to comprehend before approving. The 1603-page blockbuster was a continuing resolution omnibus bill that was nicknamed \u201cCromnibus.\u201d House Speaker John Boehner scoffed at concerns about the process: \u201cUnderstand, all these provisions in the bill have been worked out in a bicameral, bipartisan fashion or else they wouldn\u2019t be in the bill.\u201d And never before in American history have problems resulted from the closed-door deals on Capitol Hill.<\/p>\n

As I wrote for USA Today in 2014 (\u201cGovernment by Cromnibus \u2014 Blind, Deaf, and Dumb\u201d), \u201cIgnorance of the law is an excuse only for the congressmen who voted for the law<\/strong>.\u201d There have been plenty of \u201cscale-buster\u201d pieces of legislation enacted without having been read since then, usually accompanied by sporadic media whining about the process. Most politicians\u2019 love of power will always exceed their intellectual curiosity.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cYou can lead a man to Congress but you can\u2019t make him think,\u201d quipped Milton Berle in 1956<\/strong>. Or read. According to a 1977 survey of House members by the House Administration Committee, the average congressman spends only 11 minutes a day reading at work. That survey result was so embarrassing that it has not been repeated since then. Congress has its own legislative research agencies as well as instant access to more than 4000 reports regularly produced by other federal agencies. But former ten-term congressman Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) admitted that \u201ca lot of the reports that have been mandated from these federal agencies are so overwhelming that I didn\u2019t generally look at them.\u201d Rather than reading the reports, one longtime congressional staffer told the Washington Post in 2014 that \u201cwe used them as doorstops.\u201d<\/p>\n

Legislative ignorance is treacherous in part because there is no Hippocratic Oath \u2014 \u201cfirst, do no harm\u201d \u2014 on Capitol Hill. Because politicians won an election, they often act entitled to dictate rules on anything and everything under the sun.<\/strong> The hefty omnibus bill that Congress passed late last year contains a blizzard of laws, penalties, and handouts that will take months to decipher. The media will be exposing horror stories from the bill long after congressional leaders finish their victory lap.<\/p>\n

Congress would not be passing massive unread bills without a blind faith that government compulsion is inherently superior to what individual persons can do for themselves in daily life.<\/strong> Politicians assume their clueless decrees are better than decisions citizens make for themselves after gathering the best information they can find. Political action per se is presumptively redemptive for humanity \u2014 as exemplified by one congressman\u2019s appeal to vote for the 2014 omnibus bill without reading it: \u201cHold your nose and make this a better world.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Congress in its routine operations is more slapdash than the vast majority of Americans in their daily lives. How many citizens routinely sign thousand-page contracts without reading them? Would anyone hire a lawyer who admitted he failed to examine settlement agreements he approved? Such an admission would spur a lawsuit for malpractice. But congressmen have legal immunity for anything they do on the floor of the House and Senate.<\/p>\n

There is no prudent reason to expect fundamental change on Capitol Hill. Congress has always been fairly irresponsible, but the damage is vastly greater now. Instead of being a meddlesome distant uncle who ruins a family reunion once a year, Congress is a daily taskmaster with the authority to intervene in almost every aspect of Americans\u2019 lives. S<\/strong>ince we cannot expect members of Congress to behave more wisely or responsibly in the future, how much power should they possess over other Americans? Fantasizing about reforms that could create wiser legislators simply paves the way to bigger boondoggles down the road.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article was originally published in the March 2021 edition of Future of Freedom<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Congress Is Still Unfit to Govern by James Bovard \u201cIn politics, stupidity is not a handicap,\u201d Napoleon is reputed to have said more than two centuries ago. Boundless ignorance is also not a handicap, as Congress demonstrated last December by approving a 5593-page bill without reading it. Plenty of activists and editorial pages howled over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15666,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[887,426,15,521,2800,137,732,1189,983,2803,2801,2802,525,37,12,1071],"class_list":["post-15936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-barack-obama","tag-bill-clinton","tag-congress","tag-cromnibus","tag-david-boren","tag-george-w-bush","tag-ignorance","tag-james-madison","tag-jeff-sessions","tag-jim-moran","tag-john-conyers","tag-max-baucus","tag-reading","tag-ron-paul","tag-torture","tag-usa-today"],"yoast_head":"\nCongress Is Still 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\/2021\/05\/05\/congress-still-unfit-govern\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Congress Is Still Unfit to Govern - James Bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Congress Is Still Unfit to Govern by James Bovard \u201cIn politics, stupidity is not a handicap,\u201d Napoleon is reputed to have said more than two centuries ago. Boundless ignorance is also not a handicap, as Congress demonstrated last December by approving a 5593-page bill without reading it. 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Boundless ignorance is also not a handicap, as Congress demonstrated last December by approving a 5593-page bill without reading it. 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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. 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