By John Fund
Sunday, August 07, 2022
Bernie Sanders voted for the
Manchin-Schumer tax-and-spend-palooza bill that passed the Senate yesterday,
but the Senate’s only self-described socialist was brave enough to note how
badly misnamed it was by its sponsors.
Sanders labeled it a “so-called” Inflation
Reduction Act, “because,” he said, “according to the CBO and other economic
organizations that study this bill, it will, in fact, have a minimal impact on
inflation.” He added, “Clearly, the inflation of today is pushing the average
person even further behind.”
Misleading the public by naming bills that
won’t create the results they promise — or that sometimes even lead to
effects opposite to the ones promised — is an old
congressional trick. Members get to title their own bills, and the House Rules
Committee says the only constraint is that they must conform to the “general
rules of decorum.”
Some names are clearly designed to make
bills seem more palatable to members of the other party. Democrats tried to
sell Obamacare as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. But it didn’t
change any votes in the hyper-partisan environment of 2009 and 2010, and it
didn’t win a single Republican vote after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
declared, “We have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.”
Sometimes the language of the bill’s title
is tortured to create a catchy, easily remembered acronym. Think GIVE
(Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education) or SAFE (Support
America’s Forgotten Equines Act), to protect wild horses. Once a controversy
over Bruce Springsteen concert tickets led someone to introduce the BOSS Act
for Better Oversight of Secondary Sales and Accountability in Concert
Ticketing.
Sometimes bills are named a certain way in
order to shame opponents into voting for them or at least blunt their efforts
against it. Examples would include the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act (Uniting and
Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and
Obstruct Terrorism). Or endless “stimulus” bills, which are often called things
like the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Then there was the 2013
Marketplace Fairness Act, which in reality allowed states to force online and
catalogue retailers to collect sales tax. Many consumers would have thought the
bill was a hostile act directed at them if it had been described properly by
Congress.
Sometimes a bill’s title is formulated out
of sheer vanity or personal pandering. In 2004, Don Young, an infamous
pork-barreling Alaska Republican and the late chairman of the House
transportation committee, ordered staff to name a bill after his wife, Lu. They
came up with The Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, so that its
acronym was TEA-LU.
The professional staff of Congress have
been known to privately complain about all the games that members play to
torture the English language in their bill titles. “If they spent as much time
reading the bill as trying to title it, we’d be much better off,” one staffer
told me.
Ray Smock, a former House historian,
once told the Los Angeles Times that the Congress that
passed the Slave Trade Prohibition Act in 1807 could have exercised a lot more
creativity in naming it. “Had partisan abolitionists, using today’s low
standards of bill-naming, put a title to the bill,” he said, “it might have
been called An Act to Prohibit the Dastardly and Evil Jobs-Killing Slave Trade
Act.”
One thing almost all professional Congress
watchers and experts agree on is that while the imagination used to name bills
has expanded dramatically, the quality of the legislation that ultimately
passes has become sloppier and sloppier, as bills are rammed through in a few
days — in the same way that the deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act
passed in the Senate today.
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