You Can't Be Expected To Read This!

We're in luck! Fortunately, it doesn't look as if Congress is going to be able to vote on the Health Care Reform Bill before they break for the summer or a month or whatever it is that they do. Take time off to shed their skin, I'm not sure, but it seems as if there's going to be a little bit more time to fully wrap our collective melons around this thing and see what's what.

Now that's easier said than done. And that is because for some reason these bills are wrote in such a way that you almost need a secret decoder ring to figure out what in the hell they say. It really doesn't help that they are wrote on a regular sheet of paper, but in one column going down the middle of the page with margins that are at LEAST two inches on each side. It's only 8-1/2 inches wide! If you take two inches off of each side, why, that's only 4-1/2 inches of width for which to write one's misleading legislation. And it really makes it that much more difficult to read. Well, attempt to read. Have you SEEN this thing? As it stands, it's over a THOUSAND pages right now! I swear Behold! (And Click here)

And let me just tell you, there is something in there for everyone. I made a full three-quarter ass effort (which is a step up from just a half-ass effort that you'll get on most blogs!) to try and read a few things here and there. Mostly I just looked at pages that other people had cited as being (and I'm paraphrasing here) "the pages of doom" or "stuff that will literally kill us if this passes". All I figured out is that an awful lot of people tend to use data found floating around on the Internet and never once stop to fact check a couple of the items for themselves. They seem to be perfectly all right with the notion of "It's on the Internet, so it MUST be true!"

I didn't have to look very far with this H.R. 3200, aka "America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009" to find some entertainment. If this doesn't concern you, please wear a helmet to protect that soft, soft head of yours. Here we go...this was found on PAGE ONE! Ahem....

"A BILL To provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes." Huh?

"And for other purposes"? What the hell does that mean? They're not going to TELL me what the "other purposes" are? Why not? I think I need to know that! Are the "other purposes" related to health care? Or are they going to be like the big ass TARP bill or stimulus bill or some other bill that is taking all of our money where they just shoved earmark after earmark in that thing and it still sailed right on through! What are the "other purposes"? Implement Communism? Every third week in January, the President will be known as "The King"? For the purposes of square dance instructions? You have 1017 pages! Could you not have been more specific?!

This bill reads as if all of the ideas that anyone had ever (in the history of time and space) had and loaded them all onto an iPod and then set the iPod for "Shuffle" and as the ideas came spewing out of the iPod in some random fashion they were just placed in the bill in that order. It would also appear that the same "iPod Legislative Bill Shuffle Method" is how the contents of those ideas were constructed, as they're about as convoluted as the order in which they're laid out.

But COULD something like that get passed? Even if it sucks? Sure it could. And not just because your Congressional representatives are morons! Oh, of course that's always part of it, but in this case, it might very well be most of it.

Enter a one Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. Mr. Conyers is the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. I don't know exactly what they do, but you'd have to think that he DOES know what they do, wouldn't you? Well, you WOULD think that...if you were incredibly soft-headed and believed everything that just "made sense". Idiot. Let's see what your impression of Mr. Conyers is after I give you an excerpt of a talk that he was giving to the National Press Club regarding the "America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009". “I love these members who stand up and say, ‘Read the bill!'. What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and...and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?” Um, wait. What?

What good is reading the bill? Uh, so you know what's IN it? So you know whether you should vote FOR it or AGAINST it? So you can make a decision as to what would best serve the people that you represent? What good is it? How long do you have, Mr. Conyers? (Oh. Just saw what this dude looks like. "Not long" might be the answer to that question. Whoops.)

Do you know WHY it is over a thousand pages?! Because YOU and your constituents MADE it over a thousand pages! And by the way, isn't READING the bill what your DAMN JOB IS?!?! How about you DO your damn job and you ask questions about WHY you're doing it AFTER you've done it? Yo, Michigan! You elected this guy?? Multiple times?! WHY?? Please don't do it again or we'll just have to annex your entire state. (Oh, don't panic. It's only until the island is ready for all of the Michigan residents to be shipped off to.)

How can you vote on something when you have NO idea what it says? It could say that, in order to promote more healthy living, every citizen will be required to purchase and consume three bags of carrots every week for the next two years. It could say that we're changing the national anthem to Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me". It could say that we're eliminating February as a month altogether and just extending the other 11 months to make up the difference. You don't know!! And you WON'T know unless you read the damn bill!

(Seriously, Michigan! WHY??)

If I thought for a second that this was the only idiot in Congress that felt this way, I might be a little more comforted just by that thought. But he's not. I know it. You know it. There are others. Take a one Steny Hoyer D-MD. According to Politico.com, a conservative group called Let Freedom Ring "is circulating a petition asking House members to commit to reading every bill, all the way through, every jot and tittle — which no one did on the rushed-through stimulus". In early July, Mr. Hoyer was asked if he would support a pledge which would essentially be members of Congress committing that they will actually read the bill before voting on it and that they will make the bill available for the public to look it over for 72 hours before they're supposed to vote. His response? He laughed. And he laughed. And he laughed. Finally, he spoke.

“I'm laughing because I don't know how long this bill is going to be, but it's going to be a very long bill...If every member pledged not to vote for it if they hadn't read it in its entirety I think we would have very few votes.” Um, well. That's a little clearer. Anything to add to that?

“Members, clearly — and staff and review boards, they read them in their entirety. They go over it with members, and members read substantial portions of the bill themselves.” Substantial portions? I think you need to have a substantial portion of your ass booted out of there. (A move that, ironically, would give him plenty of time to read the bills.)

So if there's stuff that you aren't going to like in any of these bills that Congress comes up with, you're going to have to read them to find it out for yourself, because you clearly can't count of these guys representing your best interests. Video below of Mr. Conyers not reading the bills. Ugh. What say while they're all on their recess for August that we change all of the locks on the Capitol building so they're locked out when they return?

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