July 29, 2009 - Congressman John Conyers (D-Michigan)*: “I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill. What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”
February 27, 1788 - James Madison (later, fourth President of the United States) in Federalist Paper #62: "It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule which is little known, and less fixed?"
Dobbs: 'If you're the police where are your badges?'
Gold Hat: 'Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!'
*from Wikipedia entry for John Conyers:
He is married to Monica Conyers, who is former President Pro-Tempore of the Detroit City Council and the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation into political corruption in the city, and who has pled guilty to conspiring to commit bribery.
I thank www.amusedcynic.com for this contrast of Conyers and Madison.
Steven, it's amazing when the people who write the legislation can't even understand it -- especially when most of them are lawyers themselves!
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