There are a lot of good minds in the blogosphere with time on their hands, who care passionately about the issues and read blogs all day long.
But many of these same people have never read a bill, including the ones they comment on! So let me offer a little info re how easy it is to find, read, and understand a bill.
First, to find a bill – you will need the bill number. You can also look up a bill by sponsor (the Representative or Senator who submitted the bill). Not sure who your congressional representative is? Go to www.house.gov and look it up. Not sure who your senators are? Go to www.senate.gov.
Once you have the bill number or sponsor, you can find the text via Thomas, the Library of Congress’ public Web site for legislation.
Check out Thomas here: thomas.loc.gov
You’ll see a link to HR1 – the economic recover plan, hardcoded onto the main page, due to the importance of that bill, but that’s rare.
In the middle of the screen you’ll see a search box. The default search is set to a key word or phrase. But that will usually yield many results and not help you find your bill. So check the second option below the search field to search by “Bill Number.”
Precede any Senate bill number with “S “. Precede any House bill number with “HR ” (as in House of Representatives).
Let’s search HR 1, for example. Put that in the box and search, and you should see a link to HR 1. Click that link and you will get a display that shows the bill title, sponsor, and links to much more info about the bill, including the full text of the bill.
The first time you look at a bill, it can feel intimidating. There’s a lot of jargon and legalese. But if you read the bill, trust me, you will understand enough to have a far more informed judgment on it than those who have NOT read the bill.
Sometimes, the bill is modifying other laws. If you see “U.S.C.” and some number, that’s referring to the United States Code (of Law) which can be found via Google. You then have to manually add or delete text, mentally or by copying into a Word Processor, to see how the revised law would read. Is this time consuming? Rarely. Sometimes, sure. It depends on the extent of the changes, of course. Most of the time the change is innocuous, but you should always check.
I watched a couple of years ago as people who had NOT read Holt’s bill, provably, nonetheless voiced all these objections to it that were in some part ridiculous to those of us who HAD read the bill. But guess what? The mob ruled, and ignorance prevailed. I hope that, by educating you to read bills for yourself, you will not just follow the masses, the leaders of whom may have private agendas you know nothing about, and make up your OWN mind re what you find within.
If anyone has questions, ask, and I’ll try to answer.
