Betrayed Again- Republicans Failed To Call for Reading the Bill and Amendments

And Republican Mitch McConnell is lying about it. He says Republicans used all procedural methods available to them to slow down the bill, but this is flatly dishonest.

McConnell ... shut down Tom Coburn’s attempts to have all 3000 pages of the legislation read in an effort to tie up the Senate for, potentially, more than a week.

Before Thanksgiving, Sen.Tom Coburn, R-Okla., backed off a threat to force a reading of the healthcare bill. But appearing miffed, he made clear he did so reluctantly at the request of leadership.

This is about far more than slowing down a bill I happen to find dangerous. This is about the due diligence all legislators have to actually read the bills before they pass them, and reading them aloud is about the only way we have to be sure they do this.

Secondly, if reading them aloud is too tedious, too confusing, and too overwhelming for our legislators, they need to stop creating bills that are too tedious, confusing, and overwhelming to read out loud, let alone force the rest of us to suffer under forever.

I looked up reading the bills aloud on google, and found news agencies and bloggers alike referring to this as a threat.

A THREAT? Really? Think about that.

If these bills are so noxious and toxic that merely requiring its authors and those who will be voting on it to sit through a single oral reading can be called a threat, then these bills are too dangerous to be passed, and our legislators are too dangerous to be permitted to remain in office.

This is supposed to be standard procedure, but hasn't been in decades. The fact that it's seen by most as a 'threat' to simply expect the government to live by its own rules and merely read the bill they want to impose on the rest of us is an indication of just how far Congress has fallen from the vision of the Founding Fathers. That those who wrote our Constitution fully expected that responsible legislators would WANT to read bills aloud before voting on them can be seen by the fact that unanimous consent is required in order to bypass the requirement that all bills be read on the floor. The fact that this unanimous consent has been taken for granted doesn't prove there is something wrong with a Senator or Congressman withholding that consent- it proves there's something wrong, and has been for ages, with the crop of permanent politicans who routinely give that consent and are shocked and disgusted that anybody would 'threaten' them with having to listen to their own bills!

This rule, by the way, is over 200 years old. When did it become standard procedure to consider the bills passed by the Senate and Congress too horrible to listen to?

Every day the Congress or Senate is in session, with every bill presented, men and women who allegedly represent us, every single one of them, Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Independent, every one of them, consistently choose to maintain Congressional customs protecting their own power and privileges at the expense of voters, at the expense of doing the right thing.


It's wrong. Every bill and every amendment should be read aloud in it entirety before a vote, and no unanimous vote should be permitted to dispense with this necessary check on our legislators. If the bills they are writing are too horrible to hear, they are too horrible to pass.

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