The Read the Bills Act of 2006
Accountability is the Republican theme for the upcoming election next month. Congress recently passed the The Read the Bills Act of 2006, which will finally force our elected officials to read the laws that they have been passing. Without reading. Yes, it came as a shock to us as well that the government has been passing so many laws for years that didn’t even get as much as a considerate, even if spurious, glance. “I don’t even know what I’m voting for anymore,” Ted Kennedy said in a low, sobering tone. Ted Kennedy passed the Blue Label. We took a quick swig.
“You see, how we sneak our own personal agendas into bills is to place small, extremely difficult to understand clauses deep within our bills that no one catches. The small text works wonders. This way, we have our loopholes. It’s been working this way for years, but, it will stop with this bill.” Ted told us.
The Read the Bills Act of 2006 will require of our congressman and senators to read EVERY SECTION of EVERY BILL that is passed. Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner mentioned that, “That’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of tax dollars. Most importantly, it’s going to put us to work, something we really haven’t been doing and getting paid very nicely for it. I mean, if the average American had our work ethics, half the nation would be unemployed.” Yikes!
In an ironic twist, or obviously way to finish this story, the bill wasn’t even read by any of our elected officials. Ralph Nader shrugged, “They waited until the day before vacation to have discussion and vote on the bill. They were too distracted with the Mark Foley scandal and passing other bills with loopholes. Basically, they don’t have to read the bill if they have a lobbyist summarize it for them.” Ralph sighed. “Can’t any one see that maybe having lobbyists write and summarize the bill might be a huge problem? Not that this is a real change from the previous way the system worked.”
“Shut up Ralph Nader, you stupid… communist,” an angry and upset Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin barked.
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Is it unlawful to just skim over this article, or do I have to read the whole thing?
Comment by Fat Kid At McDonalds — 11/8/06 @ 12:07 am
If you pretty much know where the punchline is heading, I won’t feel bad. Just check out the link at the bottom.
Comment by Recipher — 11/8/06 @ 3:40 am
You know what would be even better? If a law was passed that required polititians to hear an audiobook of the laws that they are proposing, as read by James Earl Jones…. He could even use his Darth Vader voice…
I did like this article by the way. My above post was just a lame joke. Hey, they can’t all be winners….
Comment by Fat Kid At McDonalds — 11/8/06 @ 11:23 am
Haha, no I was kidding too.
You know, I do recall hearing something about them wanting to give an iPod to every congressman so they could put all the bills on there.
Visionary Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig recorded a special video presentation specifically for IPac’s campaign. Each iPod also comes loaded with content from Creative Commons music from artists like Chuck D and The Beastie Boys, hundreds of photos from flickr.com, and classic literature such as the complete works of Shakespeare.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2006/4/11/3556
Now if we could just put the damn laws on those things read by James Earl Jones, or Morgan Freeman, it would still probably make no difference as the laws can only be understood by PhD law professors because of all the loopholes.
Comment by Recipher — 11/8/06 @ 4:35 pm
You can separate congress into two groups:
One will have the bills read to them by Paris Hilton (actually, it would have to be Ms Hilton lip-synching to someone else reading), and the other group would have the bills read to them by a congressional page-boy….
Now we’re getting somewhere!
Comment by Fat Kid at McDonalds — 11/9/06 @ 2:46 pm
And for the congressmen too busy taking bribes from corporations to show up for work, we could put the videos on the computernets and have them download directly to the iPods! The intro can be by Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones. This is bulletproof!
Comment by Recipher — 11/13/06 @ 4:46 pm
Don’t look now, but I think there’s a black helicopter hovering over your house….
Comment by Fat Kid At McDonalds — 11/15/06 @ 3:42 pm
Funny! Too bad they won’t actually do something like this.
We need to bring back tarring and feathering.
Comment by Trevor — 1/16/07 @ 1:36 pm