Budget bills in particular can get really tedious. And any bill that, say, strikes or adds a word to already extant law, would require reading the entirety of the law so changed.
I don’t care if they stay awake, I want to end omnibus Bible sized bills full of pork and erosions of our rights being put in bills that would otherwise be in the interests of the people.
Forcing them the discomfort of having to read it out loud all by themselves should help greatly with that.
I’m looking at you former speaker of the house that said we have to pass the bill to know what’s in it.
This will incentive Congress to delegate more than they do now. Instead of line items for each major expense in a budget bill, they'll just assign X billions of dollars to Y agency to parcel out as the agency director wishes.
Yes and that will reduce pork by no longer mandating the Army to buy a specific number of tanks that are built in an important Congressman’s district when they really need money to fix a barracks.
While we're at it, every Git pull request should have to be read out in full. No `git diff` - that's just as bad as what Congress does. Read every source file, even the ones that didn't changed, just to be sure. /s
That doesn't mean shorter is always better. When you take away necessary detail to make things shorter, you wind up with a shorter, less perfect law.
For instance, if the law was "No driving over 70mph on I-75", shortening the law to "No driving" isn't an improvement. And even if we maintain the detail and shorten to "No 70+mph driving @ I-75" it doesn't improve things.
Concise is good. shortness for shortness sake is not. We don't need to be playing code golf with laws.
> Can Congress pass a law outlawing giving bills cute names that are completely irrelevant to the intent of the law? Once they get that accomplished they can work on something else
It's sometimes helpful to look at the name of the bill & assume that the bill will achieve the exact opposite.
> Can we make congressmen actually read the bills they vote on?
Most Congress members vote based on spheres of influence, not spheres of interest. The lobbyists that fund the politician's campaign tells the politician how to vote & the consequences of voting against the lobbyist's wishes.
We tried that a century ago, but it was just racism in disguise. Why would we assume any questionnaire people must take today won't be abused for other agendas?