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- Everyone discussing this law should really read the text The difficulty in doing so is a big part of the problem. As per AOC's comments on twitter yesterday

by seanc 6y ago

- Everyone discussing this law should really read the text The difficulty in doing so is a big part of the problem. As per AOC's comments on twitter yesterday, at 2PM Members of Congress got 5000 pages of bill dropped on their desk with a vote call at 4PM. The whole thing needs to be much more transparent.

setr 6y ago
Shouldn’t the collective default be to simply vote “no” if it’s given like this I don’t know why the behavior would exist otherwise..
- RobRivera 6y ago
  Perhaps because there is entire political dance at play here where you toe the agenda lines of your whip in exchange for future political support?
- tt433 6y ago
  The key problem is essentially the Hastert rule and its infection of the Senate. Legislation is only considered by leadership, who only concern themselves with counting beans.
  - adamcstephens 6y ago
    This same thing happens in the House.
    - tt433 6y ago
      I never said it didn't, Hastert was Speaker of the House when he introduced it, but it's since come to dominate the legislative process in both chambers. I trusted my use of the word infection conveyed that meaning
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    The Senate is a gross and antidemocratic institution, but this sort of thing is not unique to the Senate. The nature of legislative bodies is such that compromise and voting while holding your nose is a thing everywhere. The supreme power of the leadership more a symptom of the 50/50 political split, which empowers the party machinery. The legislative leadership weren’t household names at most points in time.
    - kortilla 6y ago
      > The Senate is a gross and antidemocratic institution In my state the senators are democratically elected, is that not the case in yours? Or is your statement lamenting the fact that the country gives representation to states as distinct entities?
      - tt433 6y ago
        It's very much not intended to be a democratic body so I'm not sure why you would fight on this hill. In my view we've essentially become a failed state because of one party's institutional stranglehold on the Senate.
      - Spooky23 6y ago
        The Senate is designed to ossify politicians and stop things from happening. One of its nadir points in terms of accomplishments was preventing anti-lynching legislation from having a floor vote for 40-50 years.
- jtms 6y ago
  Yes, it should be, but then you possibly end up voting "no" on something that is then weaponized against you in the next election. "Senator so and so refused to support the end of violence against babies!!" or other such nonsense.
  - dwiel 6y ago
    I wish more politicians would realize that this kind of nonsense will happen no matter how they vote or what they say and move on to voting and acting in a way that fits their values and what they represent.
- foerbert 6y ago
  If only it were that simple. There's two major reasons I see why that doesn't happen. First, a 'no' vote is still taking a position. It requires additional explanation to differentiate "no because I couldn't understand it in time" and "no because I think it's a bad idea." That's a fair bit of nuance, which these days is... well often difficult to accurately and easily convey to others. The second reason is that it's not just a matter of one vote per issue. It's not one massively complex issue that requires 5k+ pages to fully flesh out. It's a bunch of different stuff all jammed together, and votes can only cover the entire thing. Some of those things are often simple enough, and some are very time critical. Do you want to hold up the time critical bits for the rest of it? If you do, can you get constituents to understand why, and agree with your decision to hold things up? For every voter that you can't convince, your political opponents now have an easy in. Can you afford that?
  - mistermann 6y ago
    > First, a 'no' vote is still taking a position. It requires additional explanation to differentiate "no because I couldn't understand it in time" and "no because I think it's a bad idea." That's a fair bit of nuance, which these days is... well often difficult to accurately and easily convey to others. This is very true, but why, in the year 2020, is it still true? Why does it seem like we can argue only about object level matters, and almost no one [1] can see that the framework we run politics on top of is fundamentally flawed? Would it maybe help if we were to consciously force ourselves to conceptualize society/humanity as a video game, that has parameters and behaviors, and the state of the system can be acted on, but our actions will only be effective if the game allows it? [1] A rare exception to this in my opinion is Jimmy Dore's initiative to force a floow vote on Medicare for All https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Medicare+for+All%22+%22jimmy+dore%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Medicare+for+All%22+%22ji... What I like about this approach is that it kind of pulls the "invisibility cloak" off of political claims and rhetoric, exposing the truth that lies inside. It appears that he's going to lose this battle (a vote will not be held), but even so it has forced a new level of propaganda to be deployed into the memeplex on very short notice, making it much easier for the average Joe to see through it. I think this is a good strategy: take away control of the playing field, so politicians can't use pre-written and memorized rhetorical talking points to dismiss obvious desires like affordable healthcare, which has fairly bi-partisan support among voters. https://www.newsweek.com/69-percent-americans-want-medicare-all-including-46-percent-republicans-new-poll-says-1500187 https://www.newsweek.com/69-percent-americans-want-medicare-... It doesn't really matter if M4A is not achieved (that's where we're at anyways) - the main strategic goal imho should be to bring awareness to the public mind of the notion that politicians are not being truthful (notice I am not saying they are lying) when they say that their goals and actions are to execute "the will of the people", or do what is "best" for the American population. Politics, as it is, is largely all theatre, although even the participants themselves may not actually be consciously aware of it. "All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players." https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56966/speech-all-the-worlds-a-stage https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56966/speech-all-the-...
- Mauricebranagh 6y ago
  Move next business :-) or more sensibly table it so the non relevant to the budget is removed.
- godshatter 6y ago
  They should probably abstain instead. Not having time to read what you're voting on seems like a good reason to abstain from voting on something. Voting "no" is making a policy decision with respect to the bill being voted on.
- idrios 6y ago
  Then no bills would ever get passed again
JackFr 6y ago
She needs to be more realistic on the constraints of the system within which she is working. Omnibus spending bills are huge. The COVID relief portion of the bill is huge. So the document, which contains the implementation details is gonna be pretty big. There’s now way around it More importantly though, you can’t reasonably budget more than a trillion dollars without some horse trading. AOC’s real problem is that she doesn’t trust her party leadership, and they don’t trust her. If she trusted her leadership there’s no need to complain before making her yes vote.
- samtheprogram 6y ago
  No, representatives should be able to read the bill in full to determine if who they in particular represent would be for or against such a law. They don’t represent their higher ups, they represent their locality. Anything else is a failure in US democracy. The complaint isn’t against a 5000 page law, it’s a 5000 page law with 2 hours to determine the vote. Regardless of party lines, whenever this happens we should rightfully hear complaints.
- dota_fanatic 6y ago
  > More importantly though, you can’t reasonably budget more than a trillion dollars without some horse trading. Why? If the relief is federal, which I understand to be the case, no state or local level relief, then why must there be horse trading? Do the international relief in another bill. Do the illegal streaming is a felony in another bill. Etc. It's like creating a massive program around a god function with globals instead of setting up sane module boundaries based on data structures and their relationships. You're gonna have a bad time.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    > If the relief is federal, which I understand to be the case, no state or local level relief, then why must there be horse trading? Choosing what industries, etc get relief is very political.
- nocman 6y ago
  No, the reason this is done is so that details of the law can be hidden in plain sight, to force people to vote 'yes' on the bill (for the things in the bill that will cause them political problems if they vote 'no'). Many lawyers excel at burying the world in a sea of words that are legally binding, in hopes that others either won't read them or can't read all of them due to time constraints.
infogulch 6y ago
The whole problem is enormous "conglomerate" bills in the first place. It's absurd that everyone is forced to evaluate and have a single opinion/vote on all these completely separate issues as a unit. How much political BS is hiding in these massive bills, quid-pro-quo, back scratching, intentionally opaque text that nobody can understand the implications of until long after it's been jammed through... its disgusting We should outlaw bills like these.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > It's absurd that everyone is forced to evaluate and have a single opinion/vote on all these completely separate issues as a unit. They aren't forced to, except by their own (collective) consent. They could vote to split the bill, propose smaller bills and vote down the bigger ones in preference, etc. Conglomerate bills are a tool to reach mutually tolerable compromise.
  - infogulch 6y ago
    > mutually tolerable compromise This is just politispeak for quid-pro-quo. If conglomerate bills are outlawed then maybe we can vote on issues instead of on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched.
    - triceratops 6y ago
      There are enough politicians willing to hold up important stuff until their backs are scratched, that nothing useful would ever get done. And there are enough voters who are uninformed or unwilling to hold those politicians to account at the polls that there are no negative consequences for this behavior.
      - infogulch 6y ago
        Stated another way, I'd rather a world where nothing gets done for a term and constituents are pissed at their greedy selfish representatives and they're forced to start playing the game straight, than the world where we just let this continue forever.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I have no idea if this happens in practice, but if I was put in this situation, I’d employ my staff. Give each person 50 pages and regroup in an hour. Since most of the bill is presumably the same as earlier drafts, we’d be mostly just looking for red flags. Heck, in theory you could even run it through a diff tool!
- blackearl 6y ago
  You're reading, comprehending, noting changes, all at about a page a minute, and you have a team of 110 people, and expect every senator to do the same? That's insanity
ROARosen 6y ago
Every third bill in congress is like that. They all have teams of lawyers at their behest to explain and go through all aspects of it. It was hurried, yes. But hardly unusual.
ufmace 6y ago
Don't agree with AOC on much, but she's dead right on this one. I do wish the New Left and New Right could at least unite around getting rid of this kind of entrenched BS instead of (okay, at least in addition to) constantly dunking on each other.
aerostable_slug 6y ago
Interesting topic for a research project: create a bill outlining/condensing application which takes the final text as input and enables legislators to quickly get the gist of the high points and skip over narrative text, formatting, even penalties (perhaps color code those or something) — there would be lots of opportunities for the creative presentation of the material to suit various legislator's needs &/or preferences. I could even see clever presentations like a pie chart illustrating how much of a bill is actually related to the topic at hand. That would make a fantastic tool for an opposition member to use in order to illustrate the absurdities of these omnibus bills.
pbourke 6y ago
This what happens when your legislative process is basically a game of Katamari Damacy.
jpindar 6y ago
"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it" - Nancy Pelosi (referring to the Affordable Care Act)
- runesoerensen 6y ago
  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pelosi-healthcare-pass-the-bill-to-see-what-is-in-it/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pelosi-healthcare-pass-the...
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > As can be seen, it’s true that Pelosi did utter these words: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it”. However, the article left out important context, including the next few words of Pelosi’s statement: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.” This looks like a case of Snopes trying to make Nancy Pelosi look good without justification. Their "important context" doesn't actually improve anything.
  - viridian 6y ago
    This is an example of why I personally don't trust fact checkers any more. This gets a "mixture" rating, in spite of being: a) quite literally factual - she said those exact words b) semantically similar in and out of context - Even if you read the whole speech she gave, she still seems to be implying that you need to have the act passed so that you can see what it looks like when implemented. She gives a rough draft of important desired outcomes (many of which ended up being false), but the point of that one one sentence remains the same: to establish that the bill needs to be passed in order for it's real implications to be understood. To be honest, I half agree with Pelosi here, but snopes is definitely trying to provide her with some unwarranted cover here.
dang 6y ago
(This subthread was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507339.)

by seanc 6y ago

setr 6y ago

Shouldn’t the collective default be to simply vote “no” if it’s given like this I don’t know why the behavior would exist otherwise..

RobRivera 6y ago
Perhaps because there is entire political dance at play here where you toe the agenda lines of your whip in exchange for future political support?
tt433 6y ago
The key problem is essentially the Hastert rule and its infection of the Senate. Legislation is only considered by leadership, who only concern themselves with counting beans.
- adamcstephens 6y ago
  This same thing happens in the House.
  - tt433 6y ago
    I never said it didn't, Hastert was Speaker of the House when he introduced it, but it's since come to dominate the legislative process in both chambers. I trusted my use of the word infection conveyed that meaning
- Spooky23 6y ago
  The Senate is a gross and antidemocratic institution, but this sort of thing is not unique to the Senate. The nature of legislative bodies is such that compromise and voting while holding your nose is a thing everywhere. The supreme power of the leadership more a symptom of the 50/50 political split, which empowers the party machinery. The legislative leadership weren’t household names at most points in time.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    > The Senate is a gross and antidemocratic institution In my state the senators are democratically elected, is that not the case in yours? Or is your statement lamenting the fact that the country gives representation to states as distinct entities?
    - tt433 6y ago
      It's very much not intended to be a democratic body so I'm not sure why you would fight on this hill. In my view we've essentially become a failed state because of one party's institutional stranglehold on the Senate.
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      The Senate is designed to ossify politicians and stop things from happening. One of its nadir points in terms of accomplishments was preventing anti-lynching legislation from having a floor vote for 40-50 years.
jtms 6y ago
Yes, it should be, but then you possibly end up voting "no" on something that is then weaponized against you in the next election. "Senator so and so refused to support the end of violence against babies!!" or other such nonsense.
- dwiel 6y ago
  I wish more politicians would realize that this kind of nonsense will happen no matter how they vote or what they say and move on to voting and acting in a way that fits their values and what they represent.
foerbert 6y ago
If only it were that simple. There's two major reasons I see why that doesn't happen. First, a 'no' vote is still taking a position. It requires additional explanation to differentiate "no because I couldn't understand it in time" and "no because I think it's a bad idea." That's a fair bit of nuance, which these days is... well often difficult to accurately and easily convey to others. The second reason is that it's not just a matter of one vote per issue. It's not one massively complex issue that requires 5k+ pages to fully flesh out. It's a bunch of different stuff all jammed together, and votes can only cover the entire thing. Some of those things are often simple enough, and some are very time critical. Do you want to hold up the time critical bits for the rest of it? If you do, can you get constituents to understand why, and agree with your decision to hold things up? For every voter that you can't convince, your political opponents now have an easy in. Can you afford that?
- mistermann 6y ago
  > First, a 'no' vote is still taking a position. It requires additional explanation to differentiate "no because I couldn't understand it in time" and "no because I think it's a bad idea." That's a fair bit of nuance, which these days is... well often difficult to accurately and easily convey to others. This is very true, but why, in the year 2020, is it still true? Why does it seem like we can argue only about object level matters, and almost no one [1] can see that the framework we run politics on top of is fundamentally flawed? Would it maybe help if we were to consciously force ourselves to conceptualize society/humanity as a video game, that has parameters and behaviors, and the state of the system can be acted on, but our actions will only be effective if the game allows it? [1] A rare exception to this in my opinion is Jimmy Dore's initiative to force a floow vote on Medicare for All https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Medicare+for+All%22+%22jimmy+dore%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Medicare+for+All%22+%22ji... What I like about this approach is that it kind of pulls the "invisibility cloak" off of political claims and rhetoric, exposing the truth that lies inside. It appears that he's going to lose this battle (a vote will not be held), but even so it has forced a new level of propaganda to be deployed into the memeplex on very short notice, making it much easier for the average Joe to see through it. I think this is a good strategy: take away control of the playing field, so politicians can't use pre-written and memorized rhetorical talking points to dismiss obvious desires like affordable healthcare, which has fairly bi-partisan support among voters. https://www.newsweek.com/69-percent-americans-want-medicare-all-including-46-percent-republicans-new-poll-says-1500187 https://www.newsweek.com/69-percent-americans-want-medicare-... It doesn't really matter if M4A is not achieved (that's where we're at anyways) - the main strategic goal imho should be to bring awareness to the public mind of the notion that politicians are not being truthful (notice I am not saying they are lying) when they say that their goals and actions are to execute "the will of the people", or do what is "best" for the American population. Politics, as it is, is largely all theatre, although even the participants themselves may not actually be consciously aware of it. "All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players." https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56966/speech-all-the-worlds-a-stage https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56966/speech-all-the-...
Mauricebranagh 6y ago
Move next business :-) or more sensibly table it so the non relevant to the budget is removed.
godshatter 6y ago
They should probably abstain instead. Not having time to read what you're voting on seems like a good reason to abstain from voting on something. Voting "no" is making a policy decision with respect to the bill being voted on.
idrios 6y ago
Then no bills would ever get passed again

JackFr 6y ago

She needs to be more realistic on the constraints of the system within which she is working. Omnibus spending bills are huge. The COVID relief portion of the bill is huge. So the document, which contains the implementation details is gonna be pretty big. There’s now way around it More importantly though, you can’t reasonably budget more than a trillion dollars without some horse trading. AOC’s real problem is that she doesn’t trust her party leadership, and they don’t trust her. If she trusted her leadership there’s no need to complain before making her yes vote.

samtheprogram 6y ago
No, representatives should be able to read the bill in full to determine if who they in particular represent would be for or against such a law. They don’t represent their higher ups, they represent their locality. Anything else is a failure in US democracy. The complaint isn’t against a 5000 page law, it’s a 5000 page law with 2 hours to determine the vote. Regardless of party lines, whenever this happens we should rightfully hear complaints.
dota_fanatic 6y ago
> More importantly though, you can’t reasonably budget more than a trillion dollars without some horse trading. Why? If the relief is federal, which I understand to be the case, no state or local level relief, then why must there be horse trading? Do the international relief in another bill. Do the illegal streaming is a felony in another bill. Etc. It's like creating a massive program around a god function with globals instead of setting up sane module boundaries based on data structures and their relationships. You're gonna have a bad time.
- kortilla 6y ago
  > If the relief is federal, which I understand to be the case, no state or local level relief, then why must there be horse trading? Choosing what industries, etc get relief is very political.
nocman 6y ago
No, the reason this is done is so that details of the law can be hidden in plain sight, to force people to vote 'yes' on the bill (for the things in the bill that will cause them political problems if they vote 'no'). Many lawyers excel at burying the world in a sea of words that are legally binding, in hopes that others either won't read them or can't read all of them due to time constraints.

infogulch 6y ago

The whole problem is enormous "conglomerate" bills in the first place. It's absurd that everyone is forced to evaluate and have a single opinion/vote on all these completely separate issues as a unit. How much political BS is hiding in these massive bills, quid-pro-quo, back scratching, intentionally opaque text that nobody can understand the implications of until long after it's been jammed through... its disgusting We should outlaw bills like these.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> It's absurd that everyone is forced to evaluate and have a single opinion/vote on all these completely separate issues as a unit. They aren't forced to, except by their own (collective) consent. They could vote to split the bill, propose smaller bills and vote down the bigger ones in preference, etc. Conglomerate bills are a tool to reach mutually tolerable compromise.
- infogulch 6y ago
  > mutually tolerable compromise This is just politispeak for quid-pro-quo. If conglomerate bills are outlawed then maybe we can vote on issues instead of on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched.
  - triceratops 6y ago
    There are enough politicians willing to hold up important stuff until their backs are scratched, that nothing useful would ever get done. And there are enough voters who are uninformed or unwilling to hold those politicians to account at the polls that there are no negative consequences for this behavior.
    - infogulch 6y ago
      Stated another way, I'd rather a world where nothing gets done for a term and constituents are pissed at their greedy selfish representatives and they're forced to start playing the game straight, than the world where we just let this continue forever.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

I have no idea if this happens in practice, but if I was put in this situation, I’d employ my staff. Give each person 50 pages and regroup in an hour. Since most of the bill is presumably the same as earlier drafts, we’d be mostly just looking for red flags. Heck, in theory you could even run it through a diff tool!

blackearl 6y ago
You're reading, comprehending, noting changes, all at about a page a minute, and you have a team of 110 people, and expect every senator to do the same? That's insanity

ROARosen 6y ago

Every third bill in congress is like that. They all have teams of lawyers at their behest to explain and go through all aspects of it. It was hurried, yes. But hardly unusual.

ufmace 6y ago

Don't agree with AOC on much, but she's dead right on this one. I do wish the New Left and New Right could at least unite around getting rid of this kind of entrenched BS instead of (okay, at least in addition to) constantly dunking on each other.

aerostable_slug 6y ago

Interesting topic for a research project: create a bill outlining/condensing application which takes the final text as input and enables legislators to quickly get the gist of the high points and skip over narrative text, formatting, even penalties (perhaps color code those or something) — there would be lots of opportunities for the creative presentation of the material to suit various legislator's needs &/or preferences. I could even see clever presentations like a pie chart illustrating how much of a bill is actually related to the topic at hand. That would make a fantastic tool for an opposition member to use in order to illustrate the absurdities of these omnibus bills.

pbourke 6y ago

This what happens when your legislative process is basically a game of Katamari Damacy.

jpindar 6y ago

"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it" - Nancy Pelosi (referring to the Affordable Care Act)

runesoerensen 6y ago
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pelosi-healthcare-pass-the-bill-to-see-what-is-in-it/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pelosi-healthcare-pass-the...
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > As can be seen, it’s true that Pelosi did utter these words: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it”. However, the article left out important context, including the next few words of Pelosi’s statement: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.” This looks like a case of Snopes trying to make Nancy Pelosi look good without justification. Their "important context" doesn't actually improve anything.
- viridian 6y ago
  This is an example of why I personally don't trust fact checkers any more. This gets a "mixture" rating, in spite of being: a) quite literally factual - she said those exact words b) semantically similar in and out of context - Even if you read the whole speech she gave, she still seems to be implying that you need to have the act passed so that you can see what it looks like when implemented. She gives a rough draft of important desired outcomes (many of which ended up being false), but the point of that one one sentence remains the same: to establish that the bill needs to be passed in order for it's real implications to be understood. To be honest, I half agree with Pelosi here, but snopes is definitely trying to provide her with some unwarranted cover here.

dang 6y ago

(This subthread was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507339.)