The immigration bill is a sign of what’s to come with legislation once too complicated to understand except by highly paid lobbyists. Thus John Podhoretz in NY Post, here excerpted.
This was a “comprehensive” bill, designed to thoroughly “take care” of a thorny problem. It sought to address every important issue relating to immigration – border and employer enforcement, guest workers, legalization and the means by which immigrants can become citizens.
. . . . For almost any lay person outside of government, it might as well be written in Urdu – so indecipherable is the drafting language.
That is by design. These bills aren’t written by the senators who negotiate them, but by the staffers who work for the senators. And since the bill seeks to “reform” existing laws, a lot of it simply makes reference to those laws and says Word A should be changed to Word B.
All of this shields the actual meaning of the legislation from the public, which must rely only on the general summaries of the legislation from politicians.
That’s the culture of Washington, thwarted by the Internet:
There was almost no way in the pre-Web era to piece together the actual provisions of reform legislation before it became law. Lobbyists were paid millions of dollars to do just that for panicked business clients – and to get their friends to stick in a few words here or there that would tilt the balance of the new law to benefit them and their clients.
This time, the bill, “released within minutes of its completion” on the Internet, “was quickly hacked to bits by paid experts, think tankers, lay thinkers, lawyers and logicians.”
They reported that “the bill would be ineffective at best at doing what it promised to do – identifying and regularizing illegal immigrants already here – and would only accelerate the entry of illegals after its passage.”
There was nothing to recommend it to those who believe illegal immigration is a critical problem for the country. Worse still, many of us who hold the view that illegals have proved a net plus to the nation could not countenance the legislation once the corkscrew impact of its provisions became clear.
So?
This can be a problem for any piece of “comprehensive” legislation, particularly those touching topics on which there is no national consensus. And the immigration bill’s defeat suggests that comprehensive bills of all ideological stripes will be susceptible to citizen revolts.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have met the enemy, and the enemy is not us, and we have free speech like never before.
