When It Comes to Laws, Understanding Is Better than Reading

by Tim Foley

categories: Enemies of Reform, Obama and Congress, Public Plan

Published September 27, 2009 @ 06:23PM PT

“Read the bill” was a common refrain at congressional town halls throughout August. I agreed with the general principle -- members of Congress should understand what they’re voting on before they vote on it. Regular folks should also be paying attention to the political process, if for no other reason than to learn whether their representative is putting their interest first. But reading the text is no guarantee that you’ll understand what you’re reading, as many frustrated American citizens also learned this summer. Reading the bill isn’t a good in and of itself. It's only a good if it yields understanding.

In fact, there are three distinct areas where the focus on "scripta sola" -- only the text of the bill -- actually harms our understanding of what’s going on in health reform.

1.) What the hell are they talking about, anyway?

I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve said or written to me that “this is the worse legalese that I’ve ever read.” I’m always tempted to ask, “How many bills have you read before, exactly?” Legalese might not exactly be like reading another language, but it’s at least like reading Chaucer or Shakespeare -- if you’re used to reading or hearing it, it’s not that difficult. But as many a seventh grader has learned, getting to the “used to the language” stage can be a true pain.

That’s why we’ve seen so many viral emails spreading misinformation – it’s almost too easy to make your standard bill language sound vaguely menacing. Context clues are not much help when you don’t know the context in the first place.

2.) The text of the bill is only one part of the debate

The "read the bill" flare-up erupted this week into the debate that took up entirely too much of the first day of mark-up in the Senate Finance Committee. Traditionally, no matter if the chair is a Republican or a Democrat, he submits a “Chairman’s mark” for a bill. This presents the full content of the bill in plain English (or as close as they can get), and helpfully also highlights how these provisions are or are not different than current law. The amendments are similarly presented in plain English, argued in plain English, and adapted. After the process is over, the bill is translated into legal language. If there are any discrepancies, the plain English version prevails.

This was the same process as for all the other weighty issues the Senate Finance Committee has tackled, from the Bush Tax Cuts, to Medicare Part D, to Campaign Finance Reform. So there was no chance the amendment offered by the Republicans -- requiring that tradition be broken and that full legal language be the basis of their debates and amendments -- would pass. But there was also no chance that Senator Bunning and others seriously thought debating and writing amendments on the legal language would be a preferable way for them to understand what that language was about.

The reality is that members of Congress probably rely as much on their staff and other resources as they do on the text of the bill itself. For the four other congressional committees who worked on health care legislation this year, each of them relied on expert testimonials and consultation, analyses by the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation, and a host of other sources. Each of them have multiple people on staff to break down the policy -- often in a similar fashion to the Chairman’s Mark, with before and after commentary.

None of this, generally speaking, is available to you when you read the bill. Probably most critically, the average American citizen doesn’t even have a cheat sheet of how health care law works in this country now. How can you know where the direction you’re headed is the right one if you’re not sure where you’ve been?

3.) What about the amendments?

I was giving a presentation a few days ago on what is and is not in the bills in Congress when I was buttonholed by someone who was very insistent that I had gotten my information wrong. During the presentation, I had said that the bills on the table contain a public health insurance option that would be run by the government, but would have to negotiate rates with providers, like any health insurance plan offered in the Health Exchange. Not so, he said to me, the public option was going to use rates based on Medicare. “I read the bill,” he proudly asserted. And you know what, he was justified in being proud -- getting through 1,000 pages of dense legal language is no small feat.

Which of course made me feel like a heel when I pointed out the section he had just quoted had been modified by the amendments in the House Energy and Commerce mark-up. By the time he had read the bill, it was already outdated.  But you know what? That same amendment to the public option may be about to change again when representatives begin submitting still more amendments on the House floor. And it may change again when the House and Senate reconcile their two different bills before putting it to a final vote.

Reading the bill makes you feel like the details are set, and it fills you with an illusive sense that you know all there is to know. The truth is, it’s still a moving target, up until the point of the final vote.

At the end of the day, I actually care less about my representatives reading the bill word-for-word and more about them understanding what’s in it. The two may seem to be the same thing, but the reality is they’re often at cross-purposes.

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/limaoscarjuliet/ / CC BY 2.0)