Why Congress should vote on bills before reading them

President Obama put a lot of pressure on the House to pass a Health Care Bill before the August recess. Democratic Representative John Conyers on why he thinks it's more important to get bills signed than to read them:

“I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill,’ ” said Conyers.

“What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

And he's not the only lawmaker who doesn't understand the bill.

Mark Steyn thinks lawmakers should understand the laws they vote on. He even thinks that people should be able to understand the laws they live under:

Thousand-page bills, unread and indeed unwritten at the time of passage, are the death of representative government. . . . No individual can read these bills and understand what he's voting on. That's why the bulk of these responsibilities should be left to states and subsidiary jurisdictions, which can legislate on such matters at readable length and in comprehensible language.

Read the whole thing. It's short and very comprehensible.