100 Page Bills Are Long Enough!

When Chief Justice Roberts asked if the defenders of Obamacare expected the Supreme Court to review all 2,700 pages of this overreaching law, he posed a question that should have been asked 100 years ago when the “progressive” movement started. It made no more sense to the Court than it did to Charlie Rangel or Nancy Pelosi who insists a bill must be passed so we can find out what’s in it! Tea Partiers formed committees to take on 20 pages each among them. It wasn’t pretty! Mz Nancy still claims her Congress took the Constitution into consideration.

Now the 1,200+ page Immigration bill is so long not even Jim Costa, Devin Nunes, Kevin McCarthy or Dolores Huerta can honestly tell you what is in it or what its causes and effects are on all of us.

Do we want to leave that up to faceless bureaucrats as they establish their power bases? Lawmakers have their overpaid fun for a while, but bureaucrats make careers out of draconian rules, harassment and...

When Chief Justice Roberts asked if the defenders of Obamacare expected the Supreme Court to review all 2,700 pages of this overreaching law....

Ummmm.... isn't that his job? Isn't that what he's paid for? Did Roberts say this just before releasing a 500 page ruling on the case?

Cutting the size of bills would help, but if the bill gives some vague authority to an executive agency to make administrative rules there will still be problems. In my own experience in the senior housing business less than two pages of statute in the Fair Housing Act created some 50 pages of regulations regarding handicapped accessibility in multifamily housing projects. These regulations were in many cases impractical and in some cases impossible for compliance.

For example, the rules specified that kitchen sinks should be able to be raised or lowered to accommodate people in wheel chairs. This would have required flexible plumbing pipes which at the time were not allowed under most plumbing codes. The threshold of sliding patio doors were to be flush with the outside surface, yet that would assure that rain water would leak into the apartment. The specified width of the entrance doors for the apartment would have made the door too heavy for elderly people to manage without assistance and the required placement of grab bars in the bathrooms were totally wrong to transfer from a wheel chair to the toilet.

What is needed is not only a curb in the size of bills passed by Congress, but also better oversight into the administrative rules that will be implemented to administer the law.

Actually, these are all examples of people writing rules but who don’t have to figure out how to comply themselves.

There are numerous examples where complying with OSHA rules will put you in violation of USDA rules, etc.

I tried to read some of those bills. The issue is that the bureaucracy has gotten so large that a bill cannot simply change one segment or portion of an existing law.

This is where Chaos theory comes into play. The system is so complex, any small change in one area might cascade throughout the entire system.

I have no idea how any single person can understand these systems and bills.

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