I was watching one of the “talking heads” programs on CNN this evening, and, I am now in awe of the current Federal government, from President Obama on down.   Today, the President signed the “Dodd-Frank” bill into law.   This is intended to, I think, add regulations and controls to the financial industry in America to cut down on the chances that the American public will get screwed over as badly as they did as the current Depression took hold.   So far, so good – more or less business as usual.   Now, though, at closer look, things start getting fairly strange.   In the past, I have discussed my concerns over Congress passing 1000+ page bills that are so convoluted and amended that they make the tax code look simple.  The fact that, too often, Congress passes these bills within a few days of them getting on the agenda has not escaped me, and, as such, I have grumped at length over the fact that there is obviously no way that the “fine gentlefolk” could have actually READ the entire document before voting on it.   By the by, the term “fine gentlefolk” tends to translate to “dim bulbs” in most cases.    The Dodd-Frank bill though, addresses these problems in a mind-bogglingly simple fashion.   That is to simply skim over the actual language of the law entirely.   I gather that much of it consists of an executive summary that says, essentially, “the financial companies have behaved badly, and, this law will keep it from happening again”.   Much, if not all, of the language that states specific instances of illegal behavior, and, prescribes penalties and punishments for engaging in the illegal behavior simply does not exist yet!   Now not only do we have an obscene amount of monetary debt that the USA will have to deal with, but, apparently we are doing legislation on credit now too!

     I have to wonder what in the world is going on there in D.C.   What is the motivation for passing a non-detailed, executive summary as a law of the land?   Is this an acknowledgement  that the concept of America as a country built on the rule of Law is a mummifying corpse dumped out in the desert SouthWest, and, we are simply lifestock subject to the whims and deals made in backrooms by politicians and lobbyists?   I am sorry to say that it seems that way to me…

     Perhaps it is time – or perhaps past time – for legislation to be simplified.   This could be done in a big way by ensuring that any amendments to a bill should have to deal directly with aspects of the proposed law.  In addition, it might be worthwhile to require that if a bill collects more than some arbitrary number of amendments – say, just for argument’s sake, 20 amendments – the bill has to be returned to committee for a re-write.     Finally, to make it perfectly clear, any bill introduced to become a law should have one, and only one subject.   

     Once again, I have to say that every time I think that the world has reached the bottom of the barrel filled with stupidity, it seems that the folks are able to scrape more off the bottom and go a bit deeper.

     Pleasant Dreams

     Dave Mundt