United Liberty

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer actually laughed at the idea that members of Congress read legislation before voting it into law:

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.

The folks at Downsize DC have been pushing the Read the Bills Act for a few years now. The legislation would require that a member of Congress either be present for a reading  or sign a sworn affidavit that they have read the legislation.

There is nothing funny about the idea that a member of Congress read what they are voting on. There was a situation in my home state of Georgia this year on a prescription drug monitoring bill. It was placed on the calendar one of the two busiest days of the session and easily passed with only nine dissenting votes.

Privacy advocates, such as myself and a few others, made an issue out of it and and it was killed in the State Senate. It came up in the State House a few days later as an attachment to another bill and was tabled, sent back to committee and stripped of the concerning language before final passage.

Legislators later told me that they didn’t read the bill. Seems to be a reoccuring problem, not just in Georgia, but in the halls of the United States Congress.