Remember in school growing up where our teachers would warn us to read a document before we signed it. "You never know what someone put in there, you could be signing your life away" they would say. It's a concept we all learned at a young age. I don't sign a lease, or a contract, or even my bill at a restaurant before reading it; I want to know exactly what I'm signing. The issue that I have is that our members of congress, whether republican or democrat, have gotten into the habit of signing bills into law without reading them.
Lets think about that concept for a second. We pay these people to vote on bills and make them law. The implied task there would be that they read the bills and understand what they are voting on, but they don't. Laws that have both criminal and financial repercussions for our personal lives. We as Americans are required to understand these new laws because we will be held accountable to the items in them, but our lawmakers aren't required to read them before voting on them, and signing them into law. There is something very wrong with that picture.
For my part, a major platform point that I will be looking for in future candidates is a pledge that they will actually read the bills before they vote. Seems like a simple concept to me, but maybe our leaders are just too busy campaigning, fundraising, and going to dinner with lobbyists to do the job we pay them to do.
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