You Would Never Do These Things

Read the following and ask yourself if you would ever do any of the following:

1. Accept a job without reading the job description and without knowing the salary or the benefits package.
2. Hire a babysitter without ever interviewing or meeting him/her.
3. Let your accountant file your tax return knowing he had not read or even seen any of your financial statements.

I am going to assume that you would not do any of these things. Most rational and sane people would think these ideas are outrageous. Accept a job without knowing the salary and whether or not it is enough to feed your family? No way! Then why are we letting Congress do it? Our government, specifically Congress, is passing legislation every week that they have never read. It's not just any legislation. Unlike the harmless naming of a post office, it is legislation that will change our lives.

In reference to the health care reform bill currently being drafted in Congress, our current House Majority Leader recently said "if every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes.” He then goes on to laugh at a question about requiring legislators to read all legislation before voting on it: "I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill." That pretty much lays out a solid strategy for anyone in Congress wanting to get anything passed. Just make it really long so no one will read it, and it'll get whisked right through no matter what it is or how important.

If they're not actually reading all of their own legislation then what did we elect these people to do? We hired them (voted). We pay them (from our taxes). How is this situation any different than the accountant or the babysitter or the job that you knew nothing about? If your boss walked up to you right now and asked you for an analysis of a report and you said "Okay, I'll give you an analysis, but I'm not going to read the report because it's really long," you would get fired. Why do we allow Congress to operate on a completely different set of standards?

Regardless of your political preferences or affiliations, don't you think it's imperative that the people who make all of the laws for our country, the people who have the power to affect the lives of 300 million people, read everything that they vote on? When a business owner makes a decision for his company, it affects only those people who work for that company, usually a few dozen to a few hundred people. When the government makes a decision it affects the lives of everyone. Our elected officials are currently making decisions for hundreds of millions of people and they are not even reading the things that they are deciding upon.

The solution is simple. We hold all of our elected officials accountable by calling them (it takes a minute at most) and telling them to read everything. I bet if they got a couple hundred million calls in the next week telling them that they're out of a job unless they start reading then they might get the message.