Not Reading It!

One thing I’ve decided about health care reform is it’s making a lot of apparently otherwise really smart people very dumb. They all seem to have lost the ability to read!

Sen. Thomas Carper (D.-Del.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee, told CNSNews.com that he does not “expect” to read the actual legislative language of the committee’s health care bill because it is “confusing” and that anyone who claims they are going to read it and understand it is fooling people. “I don’t expect to actually read the legislative language because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I’ve ever read in my life,” Carper told CNSNews.com.

Mr. Obama isn’t even reading the bill.

President Obama has spent some time in the past few months rebutting critics of the health care legislation being debated in Congress, and telling Americans what he insists it does or does not say about certain issues such as abortion and whether people will be able to keep their current health insurance plans. But the president has only read “a decent part” of the legislation he is describing, White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs revealed yesterday. CNS News

Of course, it’s better than in the Senate, where they don’t even have a bill to read, but they’re still voting on it.

President Barack Obama’s push for a sweeping health care overhaul is going to be voted upon in the Senate Finance Committee this week and nobody has read the actual bill yet. The Washington Post reported last Friday that “Senate Finance Committee Releases Its Final Text of Health-Care Bill,” yet you click on a link to the “Bill” referenced in the Post article and all you get is a 262 page description of the legislation. There still is no actual legislative language being given to Senators, Staff or the American Public. That is why many are calling it the “Vapor Bill.”

The AP is reporting that “Dem leader faces tough job in crafting health bill.” The AP reports that “first the Finance Committee bill must be combined with a more liberal version that the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee wrapped up this summer. This merger is so rare that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has never attempted it on any piece of legislation — much less one as complex as President Barack Obama’s top legislative priority.”

This process is far different than the way you learned in 9th grade civics class how a bill becomes law. Nowhere in that class were you told that a bill passes one committee (Senate HELP) and a description of a bill passes another Committee (Senate Finance), then the Senate Majority Leader writes his own bill without a transparent means for all Senators and the American people to participate in the process. Maybe there are no smoke filled rooms anymore in the Capitol, yet in these latte filled rooms this week, Senate leaders, emissaries of the Obama Administration, maybe a lobbyist or two and some select staff are writing Obamacare.

The Foundry

I can understand why they don’t want us to read the bill.

Democrats are vociferously opposed to this for the simple reason that this would slow down the bill and give critics more to chew on. Senator Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) actually argued that having the exact legislative language didn’t matter because “there’s 5 percent of the American people that understand the legal language.” That’s right, a United States Senator argued that there was no reason to let the American people in on the Kabalistic workings of the Senate Finance Committee because 95 percent of Americans wouldn’t understand it anyway. NRO

Because they’re afraid we’ll find out what it really does, rather than depend on them to tell us what they want us to believe. But why won’t they even read the bill? Is it because they’re afraid once we find out, we’ll blame them for passing it, and ignorance is the best defense against blame? “Mom, really! I didn’t even know what that note said that I passed to Johnny! I didn’t read it!”

Or is it because they just don’t know how to read any longer?

Related posts:

1. Recommendations or Rules?
2. On the Health Care Front
3. On Health Care “Reform”