MARGIN NOTES: Republican-Led House Just Took A HUGE Step To Return To The Constitution! in News, Politics / by Sean Brown / on January 16, 2015 at 2:48 pm / As the 114th Congress starts off its first year, the House of Representatives took a massive stride in restoring constitutional order to the procedures in passing a bill that’s similar in nature to what the Founders had in mind. According to MLive, the two new rules adopted by the House, sponsored by Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), passed with a 234-172-1 vote, making all legislation from this point forward more easily understood by members of Congress and the general public. “For the second Congress in a row, the House has adopted my reforms to make Congress more transparent and accessible to Americans,” said Amash, according to his website. “Writing legislation in a way that’s more readable will help representatives and their staffs fulfill their responsibility to review legislation before they vote on it, and it will empower our constituents to hold Congress accountable.” The reforms require legislation to be printed with references to the portion of the U.S. Code, public laws, or statutes at large that the legislation would amend. Amash says this will make it easier for people to understand the intent of proposed legislation because the references will point to Internet sources or other locations for the public. Another reform requires legislation that comes from House committees to include entire sections of the law that’s to be amended, rather than the current “track changes” already accompanying bills that fail to include enough surrounding text to get a full understanding of the bill. This reform will help to bring the proper context to committee-reported bills’ changes to existing law by expanding the surrounding text that’s included. The last reform instructs the appropriate House officials to work towards producing machine-readable documents by including embedded tags that will allow computer programs to quickly and easily make sense of the content of whatever document they’re searching. “Congress is a very old institution and like many old institutions, it sometimes become set in its ways,” Amash spokesman Will Adams said. “It takes a representative like Amash, interested in transparency, to give it a kick in the rear to get it going.” Amash has made a name for himself by his constitutionalist approach to creating laws and has been an outspoken member of the House Liberty Caucus. Seeing him bring Congress closer to what the Founding Fathers envisioned is rather refreshing, and as Rare reports, the new rules are extremely similar to what James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 62: “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?” The actual impact the new rules will have on the types of laws that are created remains to be seen; however, more transparency is never a bad thing. After all, had these rules been in practice when Obamacare was passed, it would have been much harder for shady lawmakers to bury provisions without the proper context, which itt seems to be full of. Make sure you share this story if you’re happy to see some constitutional principles restored to our government.
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 00:38:18 +0000
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