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This already exists, it's called legislative history, it's in the Congressional Record. It's a document of all submitted bills and their admendments, floor dis
by chernevik 15y ago
This already exists, it's called legislative history, it's in the Congressional Record. It's a document of all submitted bills and their admendments, floor discussion, hearings, etc.
If we presume that Congressmen are actually trying to get away with something, even parsing all that stuff won't help. B/C they'll take the real discussions some where else, they'll "amend" the first bill to completely replace it just before the vote, etc. And when we consider the enormous dollars at stake -- these guys are managing 25% of the US economy -- there will be so much going on that it's just not possible to follow what they're doing.
If you want transparency, you have to build for transparency. You may have to sacrifice some things to get it. If complexity is generating opacity, you need more simplicity. If _size_ generates complexity, and / or diversity of purposes, you have to scale and or scope down. If that means government "does less", that's a tradeoff for transparency.
Me, I think transparency is a pretty high priority in a democracy, I'm not sure how you have reasoned debate without transparency. That fits happily with my opinion that free people generally do a pretty good job of taking care of themselves, but there are other opinions of our current situation. But if we _must_ have a big government to do this that and the other, we are going to sacrifice some degree of accountability and reasoned discussion to have it, because we are clearly at the point where it's just about impossible to tell who's doing what in our government.
That is, unless you believe the rhetoric of whomever it is marketing some viewpoint seemingly closest to your own, and prefer to blame the other guys for the whole mess. There is, of course, no transparency problem with making such assessments.