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Does anyone know? has anyone ever known some staffer that actually does this?
How does, for instance, the Stimulus bill get drafted so quickly to total something like 700 pages, etc. etc.??? and then none of the Congressmen have actually read it?
This happens all the time, and I'd like to know how. Are they pulling all-nighters? Who does it all?
The recovery package (as I prefer to call it), was a work in progress during the transition period.
As far as congressmen not reading it... nobody but they should be blamed for it. I read most of it shortly after it was made public. The congressmen excuse is similar to McCain's when the TARP came out. He was talking about it, but later confessed not having read it.
It is a shame really, that now we have an opportunity to finally see a transparent governance that many are bad mouthing it, without actually understanding it. When was the last time things were made so easily accessible to the people?
And there is a website in place (recovery.gov) which is designed to account for every penny in the recovery efforts... another unique feature that spells CHANGE from old school politics in Washington.
Most legislation is really mosaics. In some cases lobbyists or political activists submit legislation, in some cases a legislator sees the need for a law and uses an older, established law as a template, modifying it to meet the needs and parameters he defines. Almost all of our laws go through various committees, bipartisan committees, that negotiate over various points, adding things, taking away things, changing specific wording, and when the committees are satisfied (and when the committee members have campaigned for it and against it with the rest of the legislative body), bills go to the floor of the legislative body and in many cases more haggling results in more changes. Many of our legislators have law degrees and sufficient legal expertise to draw up initial drafts of laws, but they also have staff to vet the process. Probably the vast majority of proposed laws never even make it into committee, and many laws die in committee. The process is complicated by the practice of attaching things to legislation; much of the pork that gets passed does so by being attached to legislation it has no bearing on. Hopefully, greater transparency in government will bring clarity to our proposed laws.
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