A Republican congressman admitted to his constituents that he wasn’t familiar with part of the massive tax-and-spending cut legislation he voted for last week.
At a raucous town hall meeting in Seward, Nebraska, a constituent asked Rep. Mike Flood (R-Neb.) about a part of the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” aimed at preventing federal courts from blocking power grabs by the Trump administration.
“I am not going to hide the truth. This provision was unknown to me when I voted for that bill, and when I found out that provision was in the bill, I immediately reached out to my Senate counterparts and told them of my concern,” Flood said.
these are the same morons that block rules like ‘bills must be read in their entirety by congressman before they can vote on it’…
you know, their fucking jobs.
reminder: these useless fucks get universal healthcare and are legally allowed to insider trade the stock market.
These bills are sometimes gigantic and no congressperson could possibly read the entire bill for everything they vote on. They are supposed to have people who read the bills and give them a summary.
Affordable Care Act is 1,100 pages. And then you have to remember that other healthcare proposals that got voted down were also similar lengths.
They’re representative politicians in a supposed representative democracy.
The word representative means they are there in place of “the people” because you can’t expect everyone to read and fully understand everything.
That is therefore the politician’s job. They are not supposed to have people to summarise the bill for them. They are meant to understand it and determine whether to vote yes or no based on the needs and requirements of their constituents.
If the bill is too long or complex then they should vote no until they can understand the whole thing.
In the opposite of The Simpsons Governator, they are meant to read, not to lead!
The ridiculous length of most of these bills now is a major part of the problem. They are usually written on K St by lobbying firms and think tanks, then handed to favorable Congress critters to be introduced.
And that’s not a new phenomenon. It had been happening since Reagan (and probably before that)
The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973. It was probably still happening before that, though.
They’ve been slowly getting their tentacles into the system for a very long time.
Ya, maybe bills shouldn’t be 1000+ pages so that people can actually know what is in them.
This is a concept that somehow software developers seem to grasp, but lawmakers don’t?
Try submitting a pull request with 100,000 lines of code to the Linux kernel, or any other serious project. Nobody is going to review and accept it because that is a rediculous amount of code to change with a single PR. How much more important is a federal law than a software project? Yet one will have maintainers pour over it line by line while the other the “maintainers” don’t even read.
Isn’t their length the point? Maybe half of that is about the topic, rest is lobbying effort from what I heard
It’s intentional.
Literally every aspect of our democracy has been gamed.
Maybe they’re so big because no one has been made to read the entire thing, and thus, been irritated enough to shorten their own bills.
Technically, they now get their healthcare off the ACA exchange. This change occurred in 2008
Their job is to get money for the party and to vote for what the party tells them to vote for