Thread: Federalist Paper #62 Warned Us of Incomprehensible Bills

Federalist Paper #62 Warned Us of Incomprehensible Bills

January 14, 2010
by Bob Livingston

The House and Senate have each written healthcare reform bills that are approximately 2,000 pages long. Now they are trying to combine both monstrosities into one Obamacare bill that will pass Democrat muster in both houses of Congress.

The sheer volume of the two bills makes reading them—and therefore understanding them—a daunting task. Combine that with the way they are written, with this section referring to another section that removes a sentence from another section, and reading them becomes almost impossible.

No wonder so many of the elected class in Congress scoff when asked by a few responsible journalists if they have read the bill. They haven’t because they can’t.

Thankfully a few journalists and bloggers have read the two bills and reported on some of the outlandish foolishness they contain. Unfortunately, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s claims of openness notwithstanding, knowing what’s being included in the combined bill will be impossible.

That’s because not only will it be long and written in gibberish, it is being done behind closed doors. But of course, that’s the plan. It’s easier to convince Democratic Congressweasles to pass the bill when the ramifications are unknown—or more likely—hidden.

Founder and father of the Constitution James Madison warned us of such shenanigans in Federalist Paper #62 when he wrote: “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?â€

The scary part is that elected reps no longer write these bills , they are written by special interest groups