2000 pages, seriously?

Have you seen the Health Care Bills coming out of the Senate and House over the past few days?  The proposed bill from the House is 1,990 pages long and the Senate bill isn't much better at around 1,700 pages.  To put this into perspective...the Bible contains approximately 1,200 pages.  So, Congress has more to say about our health care than Jesus had to say about, well, everything.

In the late 1700's a document was written called, The Constitution.  This document became the founding rules of our country.  It created a form of government with three separate branches.  It made each branch of government accountable for the other by checks and balances and gave each branch specific powers.  It abolished the idea of independent states and made the U.S. one nation.  This document led to a sense of nationalism and patriotism.  And, this was all done in four pages!

A few years later, the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution.  These rights were the first ten amendments to the document.  These amendments granted Americans freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly, gave us the right to bear arms, gave us the right to a speedy, public, and impartial trial, took away the use of cruel and unusual punishments, took away unreasonable search and seizures, and gave us protections against specific court actions.  This Bill of Rights added another page to the Constitution.  There has now been a total of 27 amendments made to the Constitution - a document which currently contains about fifteen pages. 

I am not writing this because any of us need a history lesson.  I am writing this because I think it is absolutely ridiculous that our legislators cannot write bills under a hundred pages - or even under a thousand!  Yes, our health care system is broken.  But, it doesn't need a 2,000 page book to be fixed. 

There is so much talk about giving members of Congress 72 hours to read the bills before voting on them.  There is no way that anyone can read, understand, and fully process one of these bills in three days.  This 72 hours is just something to appease the public and the media because you got caught not reading the 1,073 page stimulus bill.  I don't believe that any of you are actually reading it.  And, how could you?  It is clearly written in a language that no one can follow.

Enough already!  Let's get back to a time when bills were written in a language that we could all read and understand, a time when bills were written in a few pages and actually made a difference, a time when bills were not full of earmarks but instead stuck to what they were supposed to do!