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Break It Apart summarizes bills in plain English
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Given the quantity and size of bills being rolled out, along with the concern that lawmakers in Washington are not reading them, a new website has been growing in popularity. Break It Apart, whose motto is “What Legislators Won’t Do, We Must Do”, aims to ensure that proposed legislation gets the attention it deserves.
Break It Apart posts pending legislation on its website. Members select and read pages, post back with a plain English summary of the page, which are edited and compiled in a final summary. The final summary of each piece of legislation is distributed to all Break It Apart members, as well as non-members, upon request.
Break It Apart founder Wayne Ostrander says, “I was concerned with the large bills coming out of Congress at a very rapid rate. After a couple of days of trying to figure out a method to get a lot of information digested quickly, I decided to try and find a way to get a lot of people to read one page each to put together a statement”.
Interest in the concept has grown so much, Ostrander says, that they “will be going to a Wiki format which should allow information to be more readily available”.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveiled the House version of healthcare reform last Thursday, the latest of many such proposals to come out of Congress since January. The “Affordable Health Care for America Act” (H.R. 3962) is 1,990 pages long, yet appears to be headed for a vote as early as Saturday.
Lawmakers in Washington have expressed frustration with the amount of time allowed to read legislation prior to voting. In July, John Conyers (D-MI) Chairman of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee said, “I love these members, they get up and say, 'Read the bill.’ 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?"
The members of Break It Apart are a varied group. The average age of the members is 52; the youngest member is 14 and the oldest is 101. Over 200 members were born before the beginning of WWII. Members live in 10 countries-- US, Canada, Australia, Guam, Burkina Faso, Cuba, France, Honduras, and Puerto Rico, Costa Rica. The group is split almost evenly between male and female.
Ostrander is quick to point out that it takes the entire community of members to get the job done, saying, “The credit for this site can only go to the people who are signed up, they are the real power behind it”.
The group is currently working on the Copenhagen Treaty and the Affordable Health Care for America Act.
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