Proposal to Promote Better Legislation

When I wrote this post regarding H.R. 133, the latest COVID-19 federal stimulus bill, I made a proposal for which I want to dedicate this entire post.

Summary Context

Far too often and for far too long, elected officials in both the House of Representative(Congress) and the House of Senate(Senate) have voted in favor of bills without reading the full text of the bill. Many times they don’t even read the bill at all! This is downright irresponsible, not conducive to promoting liberty or the constitutional interests of the people, and overall, completely unacceptable. Think about it, would you ever sign a receipt, contract, or written agreement without reading it beforehand? Well, hopefully not, but it is one thing to commit such folly in one’s personal life, where voters and taxpayers are not affected, disrespected, and abused. When it comes to elected officials voting on bills and legislation, such follies are totally unacceptable, as hapless taxpayers are unjustly victimized by such irresponsibility. 

Proposal

One thing this author therefore proposes is that before voting in favor of any bill, members of Congress and Senate should read the entire bill out loud in a public venue where the citizens can hear and verify that their elected officials have actually read the bills PRIOR to voting in favor of them. Some may argue against this proposal by saying, well then no new legislation will pass as elected officials rarely ever read the bills they sign. This is a good thing; the fewer new laws that get passed, the better. Rather than signing into law new legislation that almost always tends to violate liberty, our elected officials should be focusing their efforts on undoing legislation on the books that fail to protect liberty. Our civilization needs fewer laws, not more, in order to ensure that the laws on the books fulfill their proper and sole purpose or doing nothing more and nothing less than protecting liberty. This proposal would also deter lawmakers from proposing and pushing legislation that is too wordy – this is long overdue.

In fact, the second critical element to this overall proposal is the following; no newly proposed legislation should be wordier than any amendments of the U.S. Constitution, especially if the latter is truly the supreme law of the land.

There is no reason that any newly proposed legislation can be made more concise, especially to the point where the word-length of current amendments to the U.S. Constitution function as the upper word-length limit. This way, the U.S. Citizens, the hapless taxpayers, can have a chance to better understand all the laws on the books that the elected officials pass.