Senate Approves the ______Act Of____

An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the Senate was in such a rush to get out of town that it forgot to name an 'important' bill that it passed, so the bill goes to the House as The ______Act of____. That's how it appears in the Congressional Record, though the Library of Congress has it listed as The XXXXXXAct ofXXXX. As for what's in the bill, well that appears to be as mysterious as the name. It was officially announced as a bill to tax bonuses to execs who received TARP money. But then someone simply deleted the entire bill and replaced it with text about aviation security. And then it was deleted again, and replaced with something having to do with education. However, because of these constant changes, many of the services that track the bill have the old details listed. On top of that, Nancy Pelosi called the House back for an emergency vote on this unnamed bill, and anyone trying to find out what it's about might be misled into thinking its about aviation security or something entirely unrelated to the actual bill. And people wonder why no one trusts Congress." It appears that the government's new martial law plans are being passed after all.

Comments

You have to pass it to find out what's in it

[Jodka]

That the actual text of the legislation is missing is insignficant because, even if we had that, we could not understand it. Laws enacted by congress are incomprehensible, even to the congressmen who vote from them. As Nancy Pelosi said of Obamacare "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." What she means is that nobody could learn what was in the bill by reading it. Here, for example, is a randomly selected segment of the over 1000 page long ObamaCare act:

(b) PUBLIC AVAILABILITY OF INFORMATION.—Not later than the date that is 1 year after the date on which the final regulations promulgated under section 1124(c)(3)(A) of the Social Security Act, as added by subsection (a), are published in the Federal Register, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall make the information reported in accordance with such final regulations avail- able to the public in accordance with procedures established by the Secretary.
(c) CONFORMING AMENDMENTS.— (1) IN GENERAL.—
(A) SKILLED NURSING FACILITIES.—Section 1819(d)(1) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395i–3(d)(1)) is amended by striking subparagraph (B) and redesignating subparagraph (C) as subparagraph (B).
(B) NURSING FACILITIES.—Section 1919(d)(1) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1396r(d)(1)) is amended by striking subparagraph (B) and redesignating subparagraph (C) as subparagraph (B). (2) EFFECTIVE DATE.—The amendments made by paragraph
(1) shall take effect on the date on which the Secretary makes the information described in subsection (b)(1) available to the public under such subsection.