Free Republic

Do you think Congress should vote on bills without reading them? How about voting on bills that don’t even exist yet, except in fragments? The Senate Finance Committee is poised to vote on a massive health care reform bill on Tuesday allegedly authored by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.). A glaring, outrageous, unreported fact is that the bill’s actual text has been kept secret. No one actually knows what’s in it – not even the senators who will be told to vote for it.

Intentionally misspell a word? Yup, that's the word we get from our Washington correspondent Jamie Dupree. Jamie was talking with a fellow reporter on his way into the Capitol today when an employee of the congress joined in. Can't remember just what office Jamie said this person works in, but it deals with drafting legislation. Anyway ... she revealed to Jamie that sometimes when she's preparing the legislation to be printed and uploaded to the Internet she is asked to intentionally misspell words. Why? So that those words - key words - won't be found when someone uses a search...

Washington (CNSNews.com) - 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...

And how could they know what they do? It’s an open secret that members of the U.S. Congress, for a long time, have not read the very legislation on which they vote. Regardless of the fact that many of the congressmen are lawyers and were taught in law school the definition of “fiduciary responsibility” — which means reading the entire document, from beginning to end, word for word — they choose to ignore this all important responsibility. An excellent case in point is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, H.R. 1, known as the “stimulus package.” The number...