We Need To Read The Bills ( before passing them) sending this to my rep

[jbfam4]

We Need To Read The Bills
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15620-2004Nov26.html
By Brian Baird
Saturday, November 27, 2004; Page A31


Current rules require that bills be available to be read for at least three days before coming to a vote. Unfortunately, those rules are routinely overridden by the Republican majority, leaving only a few hours to read bills that are thousands of pages in length and spend hundreds of billions of the people's dollars.


In addition to this latest abuse of power, prominent examples from the 108th Congress include the Medicare prescription drug bill, the energy bill, the intelligence bill and the defense authorization bill. These important pieces of legislation total more than 2,900 pages of text and authorize more than $1 trillion of spending. Yet, collectively they were available to members for less than 48 hours total for reading. If forced to tell the truth, most members of Congress would acknowledge that they did not fully or, in many cases, even partially read these bills before casting their votes.


To prevent such abuses, House rules for the 109th Congress should insist that members have a minimum of three days to read legislation before voting and, further, that any waiver of this requirement require a two-thirds vote of the full House. Ideally, major pieces of legislation should be available for much more time so members have the opportunity not only to study the language personally but also to discuss the law with those who would be directly impacted. For example, the Medicare bill should have been discussed with senior groups, doctors, long-term care facilities and pharmacists before, not after, it became law.

The principle of three-day availability for legislation is not new. Indeed, it was championed quite recently by the very people who now so frequently and blithely violate it. The Republican Leadership Task Force on Deliberative Democracy stated the matter succinctly in 1993, "A bill that cannot survive a 3-day scrutiny of its provisions is a bill that should not be enacted. . . . The world's most powerful legislature cannot in good conscience deprive its membership of a brief study of a committee report prior to final action."

[aquart]

1. I want a signed statement from every rep voting

that he/she has personally read the bill.

If you don't read it, you can't vote on it.

[struggle4progress]

2. Dems should join together and vote against every bill ...

... that comes to the floor without a reading period. They should hold press conferences on this topic regularly, and they should use it in campaign ads in 06.