RSS FeedWhy Bills Are Long
Staged antics on the Capitol steps by Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI). Via OpenCongress.
Conservatives have been grousing about the length of the health-reform bills for months. As I see it, there are only two charitable ways of interpreting this critique.1 Either (A) you could think the bill is so long that there must be something nefarious hidden in there somewhere, or (B) you could think that more legislative language equals more government (and more government is always bad). There’s not much to say about (A), except that the GOP has had months to read the bills and find secret Bolshevik plots, and that GOP legislators sat on all five of the congressional committees that contributed to the legislation. And (B) is, I think, misguided—even if you buy into its ideological premises. That is, even if you are a small-government conservative, the length of legislation is simply irrelevant to any conclusion about its merit.
It is true that both the Democratic health bills are long. According to numbers from Donny Shaw at OpenCongress, both bills are about 100 times longer than average. But several bills from the last decade were of comparable length, and five of the ten longest were written by Republicans.
Christopher Beam provides some historical perspective:
Over the last several decades, the number of bills passed by Congress has declined: In 1948, Congress passed 906 bills. In 2006, it passed only 482. At the same time, the total number of pages of legislation has gone up from slightly more than 2,000 pages in 1948 to more than 7,000 pages in 2006. (The average bill length increased over the same period from 2.5 pages to 15.2 pages.)
Bills are getting longer because they’re getting harder to pass. Increased partisanship over the years has meant that the minority party is willing to do anything it can to block legislation—adding amendments, filibustering, or otherwise stalling the lawmaking process. As a result, the majority party feels the need to pack as much meat into a bill as it can—otherwise, the provisions might never get through. Another factor is that the federal government keeps expanding. Federal spending was about $2.7 trillion in 2007. That’s up from $92 billion 50 years ago. And as new legislation is introduced, past laws need to be updated. The result: more pages.
So why is legislation so long? Ezra Klein writes, “Legislation is written for lawyers, not for people.” (Ouch!) I wouldn’t put it quite that way, but I agree that it is the technical style of legislative language (and page formatting) that makes bills so long. There are the huge margins; triple-spaced lines; nested, block-indented subsections, paragraphs, subparagraphs. There’s inoperative language: titles, subtitles. And there’s the dense Legalese, cross-referencing, and instructions for codification.
But I would add a few thoughts to Ezra’s observations. One thing that makes legislative language so cumbersome is that it must be (or attempt to be) exhaustively explicit. You can’t “just say” what you want to say in a statute as you would in ordinary circumstances. You have to define the operative concepts and terms. And you have to hedge—in a refined, structural sort of way. A lot. Think how much harder it is to say what you want to say if you are constantly trying to head off potential arguments against your point. And not just the arguments of the person you’re talking to—but any possible argument that anyone could conceivably raise against you based on any semantic nuance, syntactic ambiguity, or substantive inconsistency with anything you’ve ever said at any time in your life. Sound hopeless? It is. But that’s what drafting statutes is all about.
- There are of course less charitable ways to interpret this line of critique from the GOP. As anti-intellectual demagoguery, for example. [↩]
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4 Responses to “Why Bills Are Long”
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I’ll go with footnote 1.
Whether it is healthcare reform, global climate change, or evolution, I hear many opponents (yes, opponents of evolution) say “It’s too hard, I don’t understand” and default to the magical belief system that will fix it, whether the invisible hand or the invisible spaceman. Yes, the bill is long. But when you want to do something that is complex then you need good instructions. Would you launch the Space Shuttle with a ten page owners manual?
My comment is not meant to imply that just because the bill is long it must be good. I hope that policy makers know more than I do and because they are experts I trust them toake the right choice. I realize I may be wrong, that some policy makers only want the other guy to fail, and other policy makers lard up the bill with trinkets dear to them that may or may not advance the purpose.
What I would like to see is them agree to at least a goal, that whatever bill emerges must cover all Americans? Can’t we at least agree on that?
I agree that we—or Democratic legislators, at any rate—should be more focussed on the goal of the process. But the first and only truly non-negotiable goal should be to pass something that fits the description of a good or decent bill. I don’t think it’s necessary to get perfection on the first go. Improvements like further coverage expansion, the public option (already being revived), and better cost controls will be pretty straightforward and achievable goals once the framework is in place. Pass this bill, and we build from there. Don’t pass it because it doesn’t do X, Y, or Z, and we will never be in a position to do X, Y, or Z. The ultimate goal is universal coverage, but the immediate goal should be, simply, progress. I think Democrats uniformly do agree on the ultimate goal, but sadly don’t see the necessity of achieving the immediate goal.
I agree Jim. Neither the Senate nor House bill is bad. Both will put cover more people and reduce costs. I don’t want to junk them.
I want the People to see the Republicans are not negotiating in good faith. I like how Obama used the House Republican retreat to engage them on the issues. I think that he is preparing to do the same with the health care meeting. If they have a conversation, rather than monologs, then the People can see who has ideas and who does not. I would like to see Obama ask the Republicans, do you want to cover all Americans. If they say no, they we at least know where they stand. If they say yes then he can challenge them on any proposal they have as to how it covers all Americans.