Why No One Reads The Bills

Following up on yesterday's post about Representative Slaughter's new report (PDF) on corruption and abuses of power by the House Republicans, today's post draws on another chart from the same report. This time, our subject is the tactic of demanding the votes be held on conference reports almost immediately after the reports have been issued. The abuse of the conference committee process itself is a complicated subject that will need to be left for another day.
For today's purposes all that really needs to be said about that is that conference reports are often sharply different from the bills that were originally passed by either the Senate or the House of Representatives. GOP legislative staffers have, moreover, developed a habit of interjecting certain wholly novel provisions into legislation during the conference process. The resulting bills also tend, as the graphic should make clear, to be very long. Under the circumstances, minimal concern for democracy and good government would suggest that members should be given a sufficient amount of time for the reports to be analyzed by staff and outside groups before they need to cast a vote. Ideally, one would allow the contents of a bill to be digested by those with the requisite expertise in policy and legislative language, and then with that done allow members of the public and interested parties to debate the merits of the legislation. Members, too, would debate the legislation as more information becomes known. Then a vote would be held under circumstances such that members of congress and their constituents can know what's being voted on.

Clearly, at times it's necessary to put a premium on speed and it may not be possible to discuss everything in as leisurely a fashion as one might like. Looking at the legislation in question, however, it's clear that such pressing emergencies rarely account for the extraordinarily short intervals that are being permitted. Instead, the basic intention here is to shield legislative activity from public scrutiny so that influential members can get away with various misdeeds motivated by self-interest or narrow interest group politics that might be extremely unpopular if they saw the light of day. It's not a practice that can be said to advance conservatism, as such, in any substantial way. Rather, it is designed merely to facilitate corruption and abuse of power, along with providing a certain level of partisan advantage while enhancing the power of the congressional leadership to discipline members of the Republican caucus by making them increasingly dependent on the whims of conferees.