Say Anything Blog

Or, at least, 95% of you are anyway.

On day two of the Baucus hearings, a major dispute erupted in the Senate Finance Committee. The dispute was over an amendment allowing the committee to vote on the conceptual language of the bill rather than the actual legislative wording.

When working on a bill, the Senate Finance Committee tends to work in “conceptual language” or plain English. However, the committee also wants a complete cost analysis by the Congressional Budget Office be publicly available before a vote. However, the CBO director has said that a cost analysis of the bill based on the committee’s conceptual language — rather than the actual legislative language — “does not constitute a comprehensive cost estimate” and that working with conceptual language was an “important caveat” that may not produce an accurate cost estimate. Republicans argued that the committee should take up the actual legislative language, given the historically unprecedented magnitude of the bill which will affect 17 percent of the economy in perpetuity.

Democrats are vociferously opposed to this for the simple reason that this would slow down the bill and give critics more to chew on. Senator Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) actually argued that having the exact legislative language didn’t matter because “there’s 5 percent of the American people that understand the legal language.” That’s right, a United States Senator argued that there was no reason to let the American people in on the Kabalistic workings of the Senate Finance Comittee because 95 percent of Americans wouldn’t understand it anyway.

So not only does Senator Kent Conrad, the self-proclaimed “deficit hawk” who is always oh-so-concerned about the way our government spends its money, not want the CBO to base its cost projections for the bill no the actual legislative language but he also thinks we’re all too dumb to read the legislative language.

Which might be true to some extent.  I’ll admit to reading some bills being considered before Congress and not having any clue as how to decipher them.  But to me that’s a problem with people like Senator Conrad who refuse to write these bills in a manner that we citizens can understand.