Buffalo News: Post All bills

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This is an age of instant global communication, where everything from stupid pet trick videos to the entire text of the Bhagavad Gita (in multiple translations) is available to anyone who can click a mouse. Does it make sense, then, that neither the public nor members of Congress can count on having timely access to bills that may soon become law?
Not to some members of Congress including, most loudly, Rep. Chris Lee, a Republican freshman from Clarence. They are backing a proposal from Rep. Brian Baird, a Democrat from Washington state, that would make it a House rule that the text of all bills before that body would be available to the public 72 hours before a vote.
It is questionable how many members of an overstimulated body politic would bother to slog through, say, the FY 2010 appropriation for the Department of Interior. But at least they would have the chance. And many of them might have some good questions to ask or improvements to impart to their representatives.
More to the point, such a rule might be the only way that even most House members themselves would really know, and understand, what they are voting on--before it's too late.
This has been Lee's point for some time. And what happened to a bill that had been one of Lee's top priorities was a prime example of what he has been on about.
The measure that would force airline pilots to get many more training hours under their belts before they could be entrusted with passengers' lives had made it through committee with the support of Lee and his fellow Western New York Reps. Brian Higgins and Louise Slaughter. But the bill that was presented to--and passed by--the House was different than the committee bill, different in a way that both surprised and distressed its local supporters.
Having been leaned on by the operators of some big-time flight schools, more powerful members of the House amended the legislation so that some of the increased training hours could take place in the classroom rather than, as Lee and others had wanted, all in the cockpit.
The change was not enough to turn the bill's supporters into opponents. And the more stringent rules may yet be restored when the bill goes to the Senate. But the surprise change does illustrate how laws that are supposed to be written by some members of Congress and approved by a majority of them sometimes seem to have appeared from no-where, written by no one, and been approved with little or no real understanding of what's going on.
A 72-hour review period would go a long way toward curing that problem.
There might have to be ways around that rule in cases of real emergency. Requiring a recorded roll call vote of two-thirds of the House to suspend such a requirement would be one possibility.
But it is too bad that the House, led by members who, when they were in the minority, promised more openness in government, has not yet gotten behind such a requirement.

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