Saturday, July 18, 2009

Why Start Now, Joe?

"We got plenty of - No, we oughta get the bills, have August to read it - believe it or not - and talk to our constituents about it, and come back in September and we can do it in a thoughtful way."
This quote, from the junior senator from Connecticut, is in response to a question about why he is pushing to slow down a health reform bill.

Typical Joe -- notice he will talk to us, nothing about listening. I don't know about you, but it harkens me back to "Connecticut for LIEberman" (not, LIEberman for CT, of course!) Because we know Joe has no interest in what people who disagree with him think.

2 comments:

carterman said...

Joe is just blowing smoke (again). What I wonder about is how could the AMA come out and approve of the bill (thousands of pages in length) the very same morning it was released to the public? Does anyone actually read these things?

CT Bob said...

Once again, the faulty meme that "nobody reads the bill" has come up.

The process of crafting a bill like this is an ongoing and evolving procedure, where various sub-committees adopt changes and brief their fellow members on the significant portions. Whole sections are dissected and argued over during the crafting. Then they are completed and added to the bill.

So yes, technically you are correct when you say that the day the final form of the bill is presented to the public, no one person has actually read every single word of it. But the reality is that in ANY group large-scale effort, you're going to have to parcel individual segments to groups, or else nothing would every get done.

I'm sure Bill Gates hasn't read every single line of code in Windows Vista, but you can bet he's got a pretty good understanding of the operating system. That's how it goes with large-scale legislation, too.