That kind of rule may seem like plain common sense, but it’s surprisingly common for members of Congress to be handed a bill that’s hundreds or thousands of pages long — and have only a few hours to read it before a vote. In other words, legislators may approve complex and important measures even though they may not know what they’re actually voting on.

Jim Babka, executive director of a non-profit, non-partisan group called Downsize DC, says the AIG-bonus flap has prompted more interest in a project he’s been advocating called Read the Bills Act.

“When they were debating the stimulus bill, Republicans found that this was their most effective talking point,” Babka said in an interview on Wednesday. “The way we’ve written the Read the Bills act, it would cause Congress to slow down and pass smaller bills.”

The Read the Bills Act is as simple to describe as it will be difficult for Babka and his allies to enact. A draft they’ve prepared says that each bill must be read aloud before a quorum in the Senate and House of Representatives; that each legislator voting “aye” must file an affidavit saying they’re familiar with the contents; and that laws that don’t meet these requirements can be challenged in court.

The only hitch is that no members of the House or Senate have been willing to sponsor this legislation, which would, after all, curb their own power and result in additional duties. Babka says to check back with him in a few weeks for more news.

If momentum develops for Downsize DC’s Read the Bills Act, Babka will have Sen. Chris Dodd to thank. The Democratic senator, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, admitted last week that he was responsible — he pointed the finger at the Obama administration — for quietly altering the portion of the stimulus bill to allow the AIG bonuses.

Because House and Senate members were given virtually no time to read the bill, nobody noticed those alterations at the time. And that has given read-the-bill proponents a potent new source of ammunition.

“The United States Congress is dangerous,” radio host Rush Limbaugh said last week. “They put the bonus law in the stimulus bill that nobody read! The stimulus bill contained the details of these bonuses.” (Here’s a video clip of Republicans unsuccessfully trying to have the bill read aloud.)

Rep. Ron Paul, the former Republican candidate for president, said after the vote that the entire House received five copies of the 1,000-page bill. “It essentially was not available to us,” Paul told CNN. “Who can stay up all night and read a thousand pages? So obviously it was done like business as usual. Things have been going on like this for a long time, but this one was a little bit worse and bigger than usual, so it was not a very good day for America.”

This is a bipartisan concern. Babka notes that Rep. Maxine Waters, one of the House’s most liberal Democrats, has questioned this process. Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, told CNSNews.com that none of his Senate colleagues would “have the chance” to read the stimulus bill before the vote. Sen. Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has said rushing the stimulus through was a mistake.

Leaving your political rivals in the dark is, of course, a long-standing tactic that’s thoroughly bipartisan. When Republicans controlled Congress, they did the same thing when holding a vote on the Patriot Act; Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts dubbed it at the time “an outrageous procedure — a bill, drafted by a handful of people in secret, comes to us without a committee review and immune to amendment.”

The Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan group that gives transparency grants for open-government Web projects, has said it is “outraged” by the loophole that Dodd inserted in the stimulus bill. A chronology the group created says the final language of the 1,100-page bill was made available around 10:45pm, and the vote was held about 12 hours later. (Here’s another video showing how the final version had handwritten notes on it.)

This procedure lent itself to some theatrics, with House Minority Leader John Boehner dropping the thick sheaf of paper on the floor during the debate and saying: “Here we are with 1,100 pages — 1,100 pages — not one member of this body has read. Not one… I don’t know how you could read 1,100 pages between midnight and now. Not one member’s read this. What happened to the promise that we’re going to let the American people see what’s in this bill for 48 hours?”

A few days earlier, the House had unanimously approved a non-binding, pro-transparency measure that assured members they would have 48 hours to read the bill. Nor did President Obama abide by his campaign promise to post all non-emergency bills “on the White House website for five days.”

The Sunlight Foundation’s answer is a petition that says: “Congress should change its rules to require that non-emergency legislation and conference reports be posted on the Internet for 72 hours before debate begins.” It’s endorsed by liberal groups such as Free Press and the Media Access Project and conservative ones including the National Taxpayers Union and Americans for Tax Reform.

That read-the-bill idea is lacking the sharp teeth of Babka’s proposal. It has no enforcement mechanism if Congress ignores the rule, and invites routine measures to be characterized as “emergency” proposals, something the executive branch has done for decades. On the other hand, because it’s not as far-reaching, it has a better chance of convincing our elected representatives to curb their own penchant for secrecy.

RUSH: So Snerdley walks into my palatial broadcast studio this morning and says, “How long is this AIG stuff going to go on?” I said, “As long as they need it to go on to distract us from all the other things they’re doing.” The big point about this AIG business, as I mentioned to you people yesterday, the big point here is to poison as many minds in this country as possible to capitalism and to corporate America. This is exactly the kind of thing Barack Obama and his team love, everybody hating corporate America, hating Wall Street, hating CEOs, hating executives. This is from an AP story today: “Merrill Lynch paid $3.6 billion in bonuses to its executives while its sale to Bank of America Corp., a big recipient of bailout money, was pending.” Greetings, folks, great to have you here, El Rushbo behind the Golden EIB Microphone, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. So everybody, “Oh, Geithner, he’s a dead man, Geithner’s finished.” It’s all a distraction.

But let’s listen to Jonathan Alter. You know, the conventional wisdom in Washington, the wizards of smart, the elitists, the Ivy Leaguers, be they in government or media, are brain-dead idiots. Here is Jonathan Alter who basically takes dictation from Rahm Emanuel. Alter’s got Chicago roots. Jonathan, I’m sorry, I know I’ve met you a couple times, but you’re just a stenographer, my friend. It is more and more obvious to those of us who study the behavioral practices of the Drive-By Media on a daily basis. Jonathan Alter, January 13th, was on MSNBC. The question he got, “Is this another Zoe Baird situation?” Geithner not paying his taxes. “Is this another Zoe Baird situation where somebody is going to be tossed out, or do they seem to have been honest mistakes, and — maybe more importantly– is there sort of a bipartisan feeling that this guy Geithner is just too valuable to even let ordinary rules apply to him?”

ALTER: It would really be a shame if something like this sunk the nomination. We are in very serious times. They’re quite different than 1993 when Zoe Baird’s nomination was sunk for attorney general over this kind of nanny problem. Geithner is, by all accounts, the only person in Washington who fully understands TARP.

RUSH: Uh-oh.

ALTER: Seven hundred billion dollars. We cannot afford at this point, unless there’s gross malfeasance, to take him out of the picture.

RUSH: There you have it, and that was the conventional wisdom. He’s the only guy, Geithner is the only guy that understands TARP. Geithner’s the only guy that could fix this. Geithner knew about the bonuses, despite what they’re saying. Geithner was involved in the first bailout of AIG. All these eggheads are incompetent. They’re not up to the job of running the private sector. This is all a giant distraction and it’s working, too, it is designed to get as many Americans as possible with pitchforks storming the gates of American corporations and CEOs. This is a godsend for the Obama administration. I know you’re reading, “Oh, it’s a backlash, Obama risking a backlash.” Hey, he’s not even been president 60 days, folks. He’s not going anywhere, and there’s nothing Republicans can do to stop him. “But, Rush, but, Rush, there are stories about how the Democrats are upset at what he’s doing.” Maybe they are, but he’s moving ahead at lightning speed. While everybody is talking about AIG, Obama is already on to other things. I’m going to give you a little rundown of some of these things as the program unfolds before your very eyes and ears.

So $3.6 billion in bonuses to Merrill Lynch and nobody said a word because the captains of outrage did not manufacture it at the time. This whole thing is a manufactured bunch of BS. Yeah, I called it yesterday about them knowing. By the way, Chris Dodd is saying, “Hey, I did not put that in there. I didn’t exempt these bonuses.” Somebody else did and he’s dumping on Geithner. Well, I don’t care who put it in or who didn’t. The fact is nobody knew it was there, because nobody read this. This was in the stimulus bill. Only after the fact did they discover that it’s in there, but now everybody, all these Democrats are passing the buck, and we’ve got Barney Frank and Chris Dodd saying they now want to run AIG and we have clear evidence these clowns are the ones that got us into this mess in the first place. They don’t know how to run any of these things; government’s not supposed to do this. This is bad, folks. We can sit here and laugh about it, but it’s bad.

I ran into a guy — this was sad to me, and it made me a little mad — I ran into a guy, strong conservative, just whining and moaning about these bonuses. I said to him, “I don’t care about the bonuses. What are you mad about the bonuses for? Why aren’t you mad about the mortgage bailout, 75 billion? Why aren’t you mad about cap and trade, which may end up costing two trillion that we are told today? Why aren’t you mad about all these other bailouts that are going on?” What’s happened here is that Obama and the media have successfully distracted people and channeled their outrage away from his outrageous expansionist ideas and on to corporate fat cats. He’s got everybody revved up. I saw a picture of people, average, ordinary Americans lined up outside the hearing room today where Barney Frank’s committee is looking into this, investigating these bonuses, figuring out what to do, maybe tax these people. Barney Frank wants names now. Your congressman wants names of the people who received the bonus. It was in the law that they get the bonuses. And there’s average Americans — well, wait a minute, now. Those could have been Obama robots, come to think of it.

He’s got these giant community groups out there like ACORN, Code Pink, and others, who would probably storm — we don’t really know how much national outrage there is over this, we just assume that there’s a lot of it. I’m going to accept the fact that there is because it fits the bill. My problem here is that people keep saying these things are distractions. They’re way more than that. These things are not just distracting people. These things are rechanneling people’s rage to things that don’t or shouldn’t matter, and while all that’s happening, Obama gets to march on and keep doing what he’s doing with impunity. Not because they’re distracted but because they’re mad about the wrong things. AP-Obama story by Adam Geller: “Taxpayers Vent Against AIG Bonuses.” And if you read far enough, you’ll find a quote from George Ayoub of Toronto, Canada, an American who was visiting Los Angeles when the Drive-By Media caught up to him. Here’s his quote: “We’ve created this mess. Everyone’s responsible for allowing executives to receive these bonuses. Probably every company needs to be nationalized, and the government will own the corporations instead of the corporations owning the government.”

That’s the point. That is what the objective here is. Take this AIG business, which they knew about, they knew about the bonuses, re-channel everybody’s anger to corporate America and CEOs away from government. Once again the people, the architects of this get to sit around as though they were innocent bystanders and spectators, who are now the white knights being called in to save the day. Obama, by the way, the teleprompter pulled a mean trick on our president last night at the White House. Did you hear about this? It was such an embarrassment. The teleprompter embarrassed the president so much that the Drive-By Media has not released the video of what happened. We know what happened, we’ll pass it on, plus in Missouri, my home state, the police, the state police have been issued warnings. Wait ’til you hear this. “In Missouri, a new document meant to help Missouri law enforcement agencies identity militia members or domestic terrorists has drawn criticism. The Feb. 20 report called ‘The Modern Militia Movement’ mentions such red flags as political bumper stickers for third-party candidates, such as US Rep. Ron Paul, who ran for president last year; talk of conspiracy theories, such as the plan for a superhighway linking Canada to Mexico; and possession of subversive literature.”

So the state police of Missouri have been told that if you see a car with a bumper sticker that opposes the so-called creation of the North American Union, the superhighway, that you are probably following a militia member, that you are following an anti-government radical and you need to take precautions. I’m not making this up. It’s right here in the AP. If you see a car with a bumper sticker that says “Ron Paul for President,” you might be dealing with a violent radical. Exercise extreme caution. I am not making it up. This is the Associated Press. There’s no byline on this. “‘It seems like they want to stifle political thought,’ said Roger Webb, president of the University of Missouri campus Libertarians. ‘There are a lot of third parties out there, and none of them express any violence. In fact, if you join the Libertarian Party, one of the things you sign in your membership application is that you don’t support violence as a means to any ends.’

“Lt. John Hotz of the Missouri State Highway Patrol said the report comes from publicly available, trend data on militias. It was compiled by the Missouri Information Analysis Center, a ‘fusion center’ in Jefferson City that combines resources from the federal Department of Homeland Security and other agencies. ‘All this is an educational thing,’ Hotz said of the report. ‘Troopers have been shot by members of groups, so it’s our job to let law enforcement officers know what the trends are in the modern militia movement.’” Third-party bumper stickers indicate a militia member, man prone to violence. Be extremely cautious when following such a car in the state of Missouri. Now, let’s not forget something that happened in Missouri during the campaign. Remember, there was a lawyer there, maybe a couple lawyers who announced that they were going to prosecute anybody who criticized Obama, remember that? And Obama’s got this mad marching army out there that he’s mobilizing to pass his budget bill, the omnibus budget bill, some of the other things.

All this kind of stuff, advancing cap and trade, $2 trillion more, there’s a story here today that to really fix the banks may take another $750 billion. All this happening under the radar, and everybody focusing on this goon Geithner who is just a nerd, just a dweeb, he’s a total dweeb, everybody in the White House in over their heads in this respect. They’re in over their heads in fixing this. They are perfect to destroy this, perfectly timed, perfectly programmed, perfectly educated to destroy capitalism, and that’s their expertise, and they’re in the process of doing it. And while they’re doing it, they’re making you think it’s a good thing, ’cause you now hate the CEOs, and you hate the executives, and you hate these bonuses, while all this other rigmarole is going on that is really damaging.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: A lot of people say, “Rush! Rush, come on. What do you mean? What is all this anger at AIG and corporations? What about all the tea parties out there angry at Obama?” Oh, I know the tea parties are out there, and they’re swelling and they’re growing. That’s my point. The objective is to get you people at the tea parties having tea parties against AIG and against corporations and against capitalism. Now, while you people are out at the tea parties (and God bless you) understand that there are a whole lot of other people who are being worked into a frenzy. You know how easy it is to gin up this mob mentality. You know how easy it is, especially in a recession — and it’s working.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Associated Press today, Julie Hirschfeld Davis: “Cue the Washington Outrage.” It is so obvious that not even AP-Obama can ignore this. “For months, the Obama administration and members of Congress have known that insurance giant AIG was getting ready to pay huge bonuses while living off government bailouts. It wasn’t until the money was flowing and news was trickling out to the public that official Washington rose up in anger and vowed to yank the money back,” and I still maintain to you that this is not the true AIG outrage. The true AIG outrage is how AIG was used by Geithner and Henry Paulson to send money to foreign banks, as well as Goldman Sachs and a couple of other domestic banks — in addition to what they got in the TARP bailout, the first phase. Yesterday the number was $93 billion. It’s over a hundred billion now that went to places like Deutsche Bank, a French bank, a couple of other banks in Europe.

Goldman Sachs, which is where Paulson came from, got $13 billion. Now, this is the real, real outrage of what has happened, and all of this other stuff is simply a distraction. I’m not going to be totally distracted by this. This is Wednesday and we’ve spent a lot of time talking about this — except on this program, where I, your host, am not, ladies and gentlemen, subjected to the tug of popular sentiment. I resist it, always have. So I am not spun here into a phone outrage over what everybody else is mad about.

END TRANSCRIPT

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_031809/content/01125106.guest.html

But on Wednesday, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said Mr. Obama had scrapped the idea.

“The president has instructed that its consideration be dropped,” Mr. Gibbs said.

The press secretary said Mr. Obama had heeded the concerns of veterans’ organizations that feared the proposal could make it more difficult for some of their members to obtain care.

In a recent letter to the president, the American Legion and 10 other veterans organizations denounced the proposal as “a total abrogation of our government’s moral and legal responsibility” to treat service-connected injuries and illnesses.

Lawmakers of both parties said the proposal would have made it more difficult for some veterans to get affordable private health insurance for themselves and their families.

“Pushing combat injuries onto personal insurance plans could make service to our nation a pre-existing condition,” which could be used to justify the denial of private coverage, said Representative Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly called health insurance for all Americans one of his priorities.

Veterans groups thanked the president on Wednesday.

Jay Agg, a spokesman for Amvets, said: “We are very pleased the administration dropped this proposal. It flew in the face of the government’s covenant to care for all service-connected needs of our veterans.”

Glen M. Gardner Jr., national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said Mr. Obama had told veterans on Monday that he would listen to their concerns. “The president kept to his word and made the right decision,” Mr. Gardner said.

Senior members of Congress had threatened to kill the proposal if Mr. Obama pushed it.

The chairmen of the House and Senate Committees on Veterans Affairs, Senator Daniel K. Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii, and Representative Bob Filner, Democrat of California, had publicly opposed the proposal.

“Our budget cannot be balanced on the backs of our nation’s combat-wounded heroes,” Mr. Filner said.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, announced the president’s decision Wednesday afternoon at a meeting with veterans groups. Leaders of the organizations had pressed their concerns a few hours earlier in a meeting at the White House with Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff.

Eric Shinseki, the secretary of veterans affairs, said Mr. Obama was requesting $113 billion for the department in 2010, an increase of 16 percent over this year’s amount. The budget includes money to treat 419,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, up 15 percent from this year and 61 percent from 2008.

Having dropped the idea of billing private insurers for the treatment of service-connected conditions, administration officials have told veterans groups that they want to find another way to save a similar amount of money.

One way is to collect payments from private insurers who are already responsible for some care provided to veterans for needs unrelated to their military service.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/us/politics/19vets.html?ref=us

The latest shock concerns the proposal to force private insurance companies to pay for treating disabled veterans.

As reported, in part, at Yahoonews:

“The leader of the nation’s largest veterans organization says he is ‘deeply disappointed and concerned’ after a meeting with President Obama today to discuss a proposal to force private insurance companies to pay for the treatment of military veterans who have suffered service-connected disabilities and injuries. The Obama administration recently revealed a plan to require private insurance carriers to reimburse the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in such cases.

‘It became apparent during our discussion today that the President intends to move forward with this unreasonable plan,’said Commander David K. Rehbein of The American Legion. ‘He says he is looking to generate $540-million by this method, but refused to hear arguments about the moral and government-avowed obligations that would be compromised by it.’ ”

With this sort of insanity making news on an almost daily basis, reasonable leaders of the Democrat party, if there are any, need to visit the Oval Office and remind Obama that disabled veterans are American heroes, and the very essence of patriotism and sacrifice.

Without contributions made by war veterans, America’s freedom and liberty would be very much in doubt.

President Obama needs to know that the very last thing that he should advocate is a policy that would pile additional burden on the backs of the men and women whom have served in harm’s way to defend our great nation.

Everyone realizes that difficult choices must be made in perilous times. Pain will be necessary, but why in the hell would the president go after the most noble and worthy citizens in our midst?

Rather than punishing stalwart citizens who have defended America during time of war, Obama should “go after” the hundreds of billions of taxpayers dollars that are wasted on providing public services to invading illegal aliens who have no business even being in America.

Even lifelong liberals should be capable of seeing the wrong in dumping disabled war veterans while embracing illegal aliens!

By John Lillpop  Tuesday, March 17, 2009

As it was, Mr. Bush suffered a deluge of unfounded criticism over the “bulge” in his jacket during the first presidential debate in 2004. The bizarre claim was that somehow this bulge allowed Karl Rove or someone else to tell Mr. Bush what to say during the debate. Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe raised the issue. Salon.com asked, “Was President Bush literally channeling Karl Rove in his first debate with John Kerry?” The Washington Post noted, “Journalists had been passing around the link to the photo all week” and referred to the “widespread” speculation.

Well, it might be time to ask even more seriously if David Axelrod is Barack Obama’s brain.

Finally, last Friday, Politico broached a topic that has been talked about in Washington for months – Obama’s almost total reliance on a teleprompter. The Politico went so far as referring to it as a “crutch” that created awkward moments witnessed by the press that made taking pictures of the president and others in the White House tricky. It is hard for the media to ignore the teleprompter when they are angling for shots so that the teleprompters aren’t blocking pictures of the president and others.

Towson University political science professor and presidential historian Martha Joynt Kumar noted this use of the teleprompter “is just something presidents haven’t done.” Until now.

Just last week, Obama’s presentation of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as head of Health and Human Services created an awkward silence between the Obama and Sebelius presentations while everyone had to wait for the teleprompters to be lowered to be moved out of the way. Politico mentioned the “uncomfortable laughter” the delay produced from the audience.

The American Spectator notes that for many events: “… down to many of the questions and the answers to those questions. … [t]eleprompter screens at the events scrolled not only his opening remarks, but also statistics and information he could use to answer questions.” It quoted one Obama advisor as saying that Mr. Obama is looking at installing a computer screen in White House podiums so “it would make it easier for the comms (communications) guys to pass along information without being obvious about it.”

The notion that a computer technician is queuing up the president’s answers to questions is disturbing. One can easily imagine a Saturday Night Live skit where a technician waits with a canned set of answers to possible questions and from time to time cues up the wrong one.

Some have noted that Mr. Obama’s stumbling speeches have occurred when teleprompters have malfunctioned. The Politico reports that President-elect Obama’s vacation to Hawaii last year was actually used to try “wean[ing] himself off of the device … But no such luck.”

Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog followed the Late Night comics during the first month of the Obama presidency and noted the complete lack of jokes about the new president. Of course, that is nothing new. During the campaign last year from Jan. 1 to July 31, the Center for Media and Public Affairs found that both John McCain and Hillary Clinton had at least twice as many jokes about them by network comedians as about Mr. Obama.

Yet possibly the comedians have an excuse for missing this, given the virtually complete lack of coverage by the news media. With all the effort to maneuver camera shots to avoid teleprompters blocking Mr. Obama’s pictures, the news media has no such excuse.

While the teleprompter might let Mr. Obama blame someone else whenever the answer turns out to be wrong, we would like to have a president who occasionally comes across as more than a TV anchor reading a script.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/mar/10/obamas-reliance-on-teleprompters/