Dishonorable Gentlemen
Read this first, and then join me for a discussion at the end:
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the health-care reform bill now pending in Congress would garner very few votes if lawmakers actually had to read the entire bill before voting on it.
“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.
Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.
In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.
They voted on crap-and-betrayed without reading the bill—in fact, there was no bill when they passed it—the same went for the stimulus deal, and now the same is in store for health care.
I’d say our political process—certainly the legislative process—is broke, and needs fixing.
I can’t say what the fix is—term limits? massive turnover from Democrat to Republican? rejection of these initiatives in the courts as unconstitutional?—but I fear it’s already too late. This is not the same country it was six months ago, and the changes have all been for the worse. But are they irreparable?
Carol said,
July 9, 2009 @ 8:17 pm
Is there a law passed that cannot be repealed? I have heard people say “if we do thus and so, it will be too late because once you do thus and so you cannot go back.” But why in hell not? Any law passed can be repealed, and the devil take the hindmost. It may take drastic surgery to fix the damage, but we will have to start sometime.