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CSotD: Footnotes are the new gridlock

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Mike Peterson Published: January 6, 2011 1 minute 2 comments

I have no idea how the new House rule is going to work, but I suspect that Chan Lowe has got it about right. I'd love to think that the rule will lead to both a better understanding of the federal government as well as better-drafted bills that are more easily defended.

I'd also love to believe that people would look at a birth certificate and know what it means, or that they would recognize that climate change includes unusual cold weather as well as overall warming. But I suspect he's right — the Constitutional justifications will be vague and I also suspect they will be buried deep within the texts of these bills. And, after all, how many people who chanted "Read the bill!" had, um, read the bill?

The next two years will see a lot of political theater amid an atmosphere that will swing from gridlock to business-as-usual, and the best we can probably hope for is that enough people will find their own cattle being gored that they'll begin to recognize the price of silence. We've been through extreme periods before — notably in the 1920s and 1950s — and have emerged more-or-less unharmed, but that's a little like saying, "I've driven into walls before and never had a serious injury." Past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future outcomes.

One thing I have noticed is that, in the comments sections under editorial cartoons and commentary, there is a steep rise in reasonable and well-informed people refusing to let extreme comments and obvious falsehoods and false analogies go unchallenged. Pandering to the fringe may be becoming a failing strategy.

I guess we're gonna find out.

PS — A later thought. IANAL, but they might want to write a new kind of severability clause and run it past a few constitutional attorneys before they declare within a piece of legislation the exact part of the Constitution they are basing it on. If the Supreme Court decided they happened to be wrong about that specific reference, it could leave them defending their new law on a narrow plank.