Legislative Reform

by Donald Daniel, July 2010, revised Feb 2012

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Congress passes bills and the president signs then or vetoes them. The intent of the process is that congress knows what bills it is passing. But when the bills are 2000 pages long, only a tiny minority of the members of congress really know what is in the bill, clearly not the intent of the framers of the constitution. This could be fixed with an amendment that congress could pass no bill longer than 10 pages, 65 characters per line, 53 lines per page. Furthermore the congressman's vote would not count unless he could answer correctly 5 out of 10 randomized computer generated questions about the bill. The questions would leave one verb or noun in a sentence taken out of the bill blank, and require the congressman to correctly fill in the blank.

The bill could not incorporate other documents by reference. That would defeat the purpose.

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