Should Congressmen Be Required to Read the Bills they Vote On?

No, they should not.

Requiring members of Congress to read each bill before voting on it would akin to requiring consumers to read computer code before buying software.  The language of a bill is highly technical, and nearly impossible for non-experts to follow.  And if you haven’t noticed, the U.S. Congress has a healthy share of “non-experts.”

Bruce Bartlett writes about this at Capital Gains and Games.  The language of a bill is a technical mess of legal jargon.  In addition, bills make reference to existing laws, which themselves are written in complicated language that makes reference to still other laws.  “Reading” a bill means wading through all the legalese, and tracking down all the cross-references and reading all that legalese, and then tracking down all of those laws’ references, and so on.  On top of all this are court decisions that change the meaning and application of existing laws, but are not recorded in the laws themselves.

For these reasons, reading an actual bill is a completely useless exercise for the vast majority of members of Congress and staff. They rely heavily on committee reports that are supposed to accompany all bills coming up for a floor vote. These reports are written by committee staff and are required to faithfully reflect the bill’s intent. They may contain important details, clarifications, data, citations to hearings, and supporting materials, such as a section-by-section analysis, that allow the legislation to be intelligible to non-lawyers and other non-experts.

Alex Knapp follows up on this at Outside the Beltway:

Read the whole thing [Bartlett's article], which is quite illuminating. The bottom line is that the language of a bill is generally technical and may have impacts on various pieces of existing law. If you’re a member of Congress who is not on the appropriate committee or not involved in drafting the legislation, it’s not necessary to read it. The legal language is there to ensure that particular policies get enacted. The important thing is that the members understand the policy, not the technical legal language.