More liberal scoffing at analyzing the health care bill before voting on it

Today I caught a sound bite from one by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (Twit-RI), comparing reading the 2000+ page health care bill to a 13 year old girl blowing through a Harry Potter novel. That's an interesting take on it.

For the sake of argument, let's have a look at the difference.

A Harry Potter book runs in sequence, is cohesive and makes sense. Everything you need is right there in the same book and given to you in a logical sequence. That means that by the time you get to page 341, you have everything you need to make sense of what you are reading on that page.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (Twit-NV) Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is not quite so simple. For example, have a look at the first page of proposed legislation after the index.

1 TITLE I—QUALITY, AFFORDABLE
2 HEALTH CARE FOR ALL
3 AMERICANS
4 Subtitle A—Immediate Improve
5 ments in Health Care Coverage
6 for All Americans
7 SEC. 1001. AMENDMENTS TO THE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE
8 ACT.
9 Part A of title XXVII of the Public Health Service
10 Act (42 U.S.C. 300gg et seq.) is amended—
11 (1) by striking the part heading and inserting
12 the following:
13 ‘‘PART A—INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP MARKET
14 REFORMS’’;
15 (2) by redesignating sections 2704 through
16 2707 as sections 2725 through 2728, respectively;
17 (3) by redesignating sections 2711 through
18 2713 as sections 2731 through 2733, respectively;
19 (4) by redesignating sections 2721 through
20 2723 as sections 2735 through 2737, respectively;
21 and
22 (5) by inserting after section 2702, the fol
23 lowing:

You got all that, right? And that is just the fist page. The entire bill reads just like that. Don't believe me? Click the link and look for yourself.

There is a reason that legislators need time to not just read, but interpret anything they are going to vote on. In this case the proposed health care legislation will make changes made in almost every section of federal law from the Tax Code to Education to Social Security.  Properly interpreting the bill requires constant reference to vastly divergent parts of the United States Code to see what effect each and every one of those changes has on the existing law

Never forget that the only thing worse then a bad law is a badly written law.

The senator's suggestion that reading the healthcare bill compares favorably to a Harry Potter reading binge is complete bullshit. That leads us to one of two possibilities:

1. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (Twit-RI) really believes what he said. If that is the case he demonstrated in a highly public manner that he never personally read a bill in which case he has no place in U.S. Senate passing laws over the rest of us.
2. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (Twit-RI) intentionally set out to deceive the public. If this is the case, he has no place in U.S. Senate passing laws over the rest of us.

It is sometimes insulting to see just how stupid some of our congress critters think we are. But then again, we do keep electing them.

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Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.
- Otto von Bismarck