Posted on 11/02/2019 6:56:02 AM PDT by Twotone
John Conyers was elected to Congress for the first time in 1964, winning Michigan's 1st District with 84 per cent of the vote against that year's Republican sacrificial lamb. For the next quarter-century he was ritually returned with even larger margins of biennial victory. But the Detroit that was so faithful to him was in steep demographic decline, and, when Michigan lost one of its seats, poor old Conyers was redistricted onto somewhat less favorable turf: in 2010 he was reduced to a mere 77 per cent of the vote - his worst result ever. After fifty-three years in the House of Representatives, he will be buried on Monday in what will be a more muted ceremony than he might have expected.
Representative Conyers may have other accomplishments over the last half-century, but I think of him mainly for a rare moment of honesty that embodies the dysfunction of national lawmaking in the United States. Washington gives us poorly drafted laws that invariably metastasize in mercurial and damaging ways. That's because our "lawmakers" enact laws but no longer truly make them. Conyers seven years ago:
Like most of his colleagues, lifetime legislator John Conyers (a congressman for 47 years) didn't bother reading the 2,700-page health-care bill he voted for. As he said with disarming honesty, he wouldn't understand it even if he did: 'They get up and say, "Read the bill.'"What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?'
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
TTIWWP
You’ll have to translate that for me. :-)
This thread is worthless without pictures.
You speak in unintelligible code. Care to translate?
Don’t let lawyers write legislation. English teachers, or better yet, senior citizens, should do the writing. English teachers write in, well, English, not that legalese that nobody can understand. Senior citizens don’t have the time to waste on BS.
“Whereas”, “Subsequent to” and “Comprehensive” would disappear. PC language and gender pronouns also would be out. First sentence of each bill would be “This bill supersedes ___________ and eliminates all government agencies associated with __________.”
I like your idea. I would go a bit further and say that as long as the Fed is involved in education, all laws should be written at the reading comprehension level of the average public school graduate.
Did Conyers settle up with the IRS before he died? Or did he leave that mess for his estate to cleanup?
Unfortunately, Steyn didn’t provide much in the way of interesting pictures.
“TTIWWP”
No, it’s YAWTSTG.
Nuts, I thought there’d be a pic of Barbi.
I didn’t know he was still alive.
Lucky for Michigan, I don’t think either of his sons has been elected to office thus far.
Is Hilary going to preach her Trump Hate at this show funeral too? She did last week at Elijah Cummings service.
Will the black pallbearers refuse to shake a prominent Republican’s hand? That happened last week to Mitch McConnell.
“Nuts, I thought there’d be a pic of Barbi.”
So did I.
You are a lawmaker. Reading the bill is your job. If you are incapable of understanding it, you are not qualified to hold that office. If no one is capable of understanding a bill then the body of lawmakers should reject it until an understandable version is created.
But Conyers was hardly an exception - most of our politicians see themselves as "celebrity leaders and teachers" of the deplorable masses. The details of the job can be left to the staff, it's all about engendering emotional responses to hot-button issues and collecting the payoffs.
Have you SEEN any of the papers that college English departments create these days, deconstructing intersectional gender discrimination?
“You are a lawmaker. Reading the bill is your job.”
Not if he was there for mere appearances sake. I think his constituents just liked seeing him up there. Most of them didn’t care what he did...as long as he looked cool and sounded smooth doing it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.