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Sound nuts? Well, just such a law was passed last November, allowing the heads of two Congressional committees to appoint "agents" of their choice (presumably staffers) to enter any IRS facility and look through the returns on file. And here's the excuse our legislators give: They didn't have a clue what they were voting on. "I did not know it was in the bill," Tom DeLay, the House Majority Leader, told his local newspaper. "I have no earthly idea how it got there," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said on a CBS news program. The really sad thing is, they're telling the truth.
Laws affecting your life are passed all the time by members of Congress who may not know just what is in the legislation. "We don't have a chance to read -- let alone understand -- some of the bills we're called upon to vote on," says Rep. Henry Waxman of California.
That's the story behind the IRS bill. It turns out that a House Appropriations Committee staffer added the one-sentence provision into a 2,000-page budget bill before Congress voted on it. Only after it was too late to change the legislation did someone in the office of North Dakota Sen. Kent Conrad read the fine print and notice the threat to privacy.
In this case, an immediate uproar embarrassed Congress into quickly repealing the provision. But plenty of bills become law virtually unnoticed. How many legislators realized that their vote almost two years ago on a mammoth budget bill would cause a controversial change in gun-control law? Tucked into that legislation was a requirement that the records from background checks of gun buyers be destroyed within 24 hours, instead of 90 days. You can bet the gun lobby wasn't among those left in the dark.
The fact is, there's no way that members of Congress or their legislative aides can comb through a massive bill in less than a couple of days. Yet they commonly get much less time to scrutinize bills that may, according to one veteran Congressional staffer, "get thrown together so quickly that there are handwritten crossouts or additions." Is this any way to run the government? "It's become obscene," says Arizona Sen. John McCain. It's also not an accident. In recent years, McCain says, Congressional leaders have made it harder to shine a light on what's in large, complicated bills. "We used to be able to demand that the bill be read [aloud]," says McCain. "And they changed the rules so you can't do that anymore."
To plenty of politicians, it's worth embarrassments like the IRS fiasco to keep their actions under wraps. That same bill with the tax-snooping provision was also loaded with pork, like $1.5 million for a project to determine the feasibility of transporting chilled water from Lake Ontario to two New York counties, and $70,000 for the Paper Industry International Hall of Fame in Appleton, Wisconsin. Rush the legislation through and there's less chance you'll get raised eyebrows.
But that's not the only trick being played. At times, the wording of bills is intended to cloud their real meaning. "Some of the language is so arcane that it takes a true expert [to understand]," McCain says.
Consider one section of a recent tax bill which purports to define a family member: "For purposes of this paragraph, an individual shall not be considered a common ancestor if...the individual is more than six generations removed from the youngest generation of shareholders who would (but for this clause) be members of the family." What does that actually mean? According to a tax specialist on Capitol Hill, it's probably language designed to give somebody a big new tax break.
The real heart of the problem, say Congressional watchdogs, is that the legislative process has become more opaque. There's less open debate, and there's more bill-writing by very small groups. "Leaders, their staffers, and in many cases the special interest lobbyists, will sit down and slap a bill together," says Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "They don't even concern themselves with whether it's bad or embarrassing because they won't be tested on it."
Usually the shenanigans go unnoticed. But a few years ago, Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens stuck a provision into a defense bill to allow the Air Force to lease fuel-tanker jets from Boeing. Several government studies suggested the deal would cost billions more than just buying the planes outright. But Boeing and a few Air Force officials lobbied hard for the lease arrangement, and the plan passed.
That tanker deal wound up at the center of a huge scandal when it turned out that a key Pentagon official involved in the contract had been lining up cushy jobs at Boeing for relatives and for herself. She's now doing time in a federal prison. Maybe a little more open debate would have exposed the corruption before it got as far as it did. More time to examine bills is just the reform that Norman Ornstein wants to see. "Allowing a few people to tinker with bills at the eleventh hour is a recipe for crummy legislation," he says. "We should have a three-day waiting period before completed bills are voted on."
Good idea. But the best chance of reform starts with you. If you're bothered by this last-minute lawmaking, contact your legislators on Capitol Hill (all are listed at vote-smart.org). And remind them that how they vote will determine how you vote.
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