Senator Thomas Carper (Dem., Delaware) serves on the Senate Finance Committee, which is finishing up its work on the most important piece of health care legislation in the last fifty years. Last week, he admitted that he will not actually read the bill before voting on it, saying that none of the senators on the committee “had a clue” as to what was in the document.
Carper was interviewed by reporter Nicholas Ballasy, of CNSNews (see transcript and video, below), and said that he does not “expect” to read the actual legislative language of the committee’s health care bill because it is “confusing” and that anyone who claims they are going to read it and understand it is fooling people. Saying that the Obamacare bill “…is among the more confusing things I’ve ever read in my life,” Carper described the type of language the actual text of the bill would finally be drafted in as "arcane," "confusing," "hard stuff to understand," and "incomprehensible." He likened it to the "gibberish" used in credit card disclosure forms.
When Kentucky’s junior Republican senator Jim Bunning introduced an amendment in committee which would require the posting of the full actual language of the proposed legislation online for at least 72 hours before holding a final committee vote on it, the committee defeated the amendment 13-10.
In a Thursday afternoon interview with CNSNews, Carper explained why he believes it would be useless for both members of the public and members of the Senate to read the bill’s actual text. Committee members did not have a “clue,” he said, when one senator recently read them an example of some actual legislative language. When you look at the legislative language, he said, “it really doesn’t make much sense.”
Here is a full transcript of the CNSNews.com interview with Sen. Carper:
Nicholas Ballasy, CNSNews.com: I wanted to ask you if you plan, if you’re going, to read the entire actual text of the health care bill before the committee votes on it. Sen. Tom Carper (Dem., Delaware): I don’t expect to actually read the legislative language because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I’ve ever read in my life. We, we write in this committee and legislate with plain English and I think most of us can understand most of that. When you get into the legislative language, Senator Conrad actually read some of it, several pages of it, the other day and I don’t think anybody had a clue--including people who have served on this committee for decades--what he was talking about. So, legislative language is so arcane, so confusing, refers to other parts of the code—‘and after the first syllable insert the word X’--and it’s just, it really doesn’t make much sense. So the idea of reading the plain English version: Yeah, I’ll probably do that. The idea of reading the legislative language: It’s just anyone who says that they can do that and actually get much out of it is trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Ballasy: Do you think-- Carper: But that’s a very good question and I’m glad you asked it, Nicholas. Ballasy: Do you think Republicans on the committee should be able to read the entire full actual text of the bill? Carper: I, I--They might say that they’re reading it. They might say that they’re understanding it. But that would probably be the triumph of man’s hope over experience. It’s hard stuff to understand. Ballasy: And the American people as well-- Carper: I use it to like, for example, credit card disclosures. If you actually read the stuff, you say, you read it and say, like dozens of pages: ‘What does this say?’ And this is one of the reasons why we’ve directed, among others, banks to use plain, plain language, plain English to explain what they’re doing, so that the gibberish, you can’t read it and really know what it says. Ballasy: The American people--do you think they should be able to read the bill online? Some have called for the bill to be online for at least 72 hours. Do you think they should be able to read the entire full actual text? Carper: If people who work here on a daily basis and work with the legislation and shape the legislation--You know, we are pretty good at understanding the plain English version of the legislation. I think that should be certainly online and made available. The idea of folks--and what we’re, I think we’re doing, on my website is actually giving people an example of what legislative language looks like and how incomprehensible it can be. And I think if people had the chance to read that they’ll say you know maybe it doesn’t make much sense for either the legislators or me to read that kind of arcane language. It’s just hard to decipher what it really means. Ballasy: Last question for you. If members on the committee, whether it’s Republican or Democrat, want to read the legislative language--if they feel they can understand it--will that language be available? Do you know where that language is? Have you seen any of the language or the full actual text? Carper: In the time that I’ve spent here, I’ve seen plenty of legislative language and I know more often than not it’s almost incomprehensible as to what it means. Because what you do is you take certain language and you insert it in other parts of the law, other parts of the bill, and it frankly almost defies comprehension in many instances. Why that is a value and why someone should need to read that, or feel the need--I don’t understand. The idea, is actually like, say, I get my credit card disclosure and I have a one or two page summary written in plain English and then I have like 40 or 50 pages written by an attorney or a bunch of attorneys that is almost impossible to understand--Why you would insist on reading the stuff that’s incomprehensible as opposed to the plain English language that’s ordered by law so that people can understand it, that’s beyond me.
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