There's a fascinating debate happening at the Volokh conspiracy about whether or not legislators should read the bills they are voting on. (Here, for example, is Orin Kerr poking a little fun at those who say Congresspeople should read every word of their bills).
My tentative view is that reading each word isn't the point - it's understanding what the bill does. So long as the legislator is doing his or her due diligence on what they are voting for, I don't care whether they literally read every word.
9/24/2009
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Agreed, although I worry about whether legislative staff members are doing their jobs of apprising their bosses of what's in the bill, when you have folks like Arlen Specter apparently unaware that there's an individual responsibility to carry health insurance in the main House reform bill (HR 3200).
I find the ReadtheBill folks especially annoying when they haven't read the bill either -- or worse, have read it exactly as Kerr slyly tells readers to do, without the context of the existing law into which the bill's provisions would fit. I encountered one woman who was very proud of herself for having read a section of the HR 3200 and was thereby convinced that the federal government would have direct access to her bank account. Having gone through the massive effort of actually reading some part of the bill, she felt no need to read the existing Social Security law that defined the terms used in the bill to make it very clear that it was referring to electronic transfers between health insurance companies and health care providers.
I suppose it's to deal with the latter sort of ass that Sen. Baucus wrote his proposal so bizarrely, as a kind of set of ideas rather than as proper legislation.
Another view: requiring legislators to read and comprehend and have an opinion on every word is a way to limit legislation. It's like the words-version of the "starve the beast" theory of spending reduction, except instead of leaving legislators without the money to fund things, the idea is to leave them without the time to know whether to fund things.
If a Congressman has to have an specific preference for each line item in the federal budget, I suspect we'll see fewer earmarks and more discretion left to the executive without any great decrease in spending. But perhaps not, especially for those items inserted by the party that's not in the executive branch and that therefore doesn't trust the exec to distribute the money as they would want it to be done.
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