LENGTHY Bills & Amendments -- How Does Congress Create Them So FAST?

[quantass]

Bills or Amendments....2074 pages, 4000 pages, 1500 pages....

To me it's as if they shovel out these bricks on a weekly basis. A simple question. How does congress develop such lengthy bills in such a short amount of time? Do they cut & paste legalese serving to pad the document? Or do they have a sweat shop of outsourced interns working day & night?

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

1. The type is large and the margins are huge. Also...

a lot is language that already exists, having been drafted much earlier.

[quantass]

3. Ahh, so the margins, font type, and CUT & PASTE from older drafts n/t

[DJ13]

2. I think they outsourced writing of these bills to Honduras

[babylonsister]

4. Outsourced interns? I think they're actually called staff. That's what they do. nt

[quantass]

6. It was just a play on words ("sweat shop") and the U.S. obsession with outsourcing. Obviously STAFF

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. Maybe they had the insurance companies write them for them

I'm only half joking.

No, I know how long it takes to TRANSLATE 100 pages, much less draft 100 pages, so I strongly suspect that the insurance companies came in with some ready-made provisions.

[haele]

7. It's a lot of cut and paste, which can be done quickly even on a 700 page amendment -

Most committee members have reams of pet amendment drafts archived that with a bit of tweaking and polishing up, and format changes can be re-inserted into whatever flavor of bill is on the floor. I'm sure Ben Nelson is pushing to get his amendment with his abortion language (that was voted down in committee) back in, just as Bernie Sanders tried putting the Single Payer language back in.

Haele

[quantass]

8. So basically hats off to the first staff members to create the language...Whomever they were nt

[salguine]

9. They don't write any of the shit they pass, nor do they read it. Lobbyists write everything.

[damntexdem]

10. That's diarhea for you.

So much comes out so fast.