Big, yes. But beautiful. . .?

Yuck.

Jun. 4 - The U.S. Constitution, including its preamble, articles, and all 27 amendments, is about 7600 words long. It forms the basis of a republican government that has survived nearly 250 years. It is currently the supreme law of the land for a third of a billion people.

The Declaration of Independence has about 1458 words.

The “Big Beautiful Bill” (link goes to the version that passed in the House) has more than 2100 words. . . in its table of contents.

I copied the full text into a Word document, and according to that software the bill is 781 pages long (on A4 paper) and has more than 164,000 words.

That’s considerably more than the 138,000 (Greek) words in the original New Testament.

It seems reasonable to wonder whether anyone has actually read the whole thing. It is not just reasonable to suppose but probable that no one has. These are busy people: who has the time?

Even on the off chance that someone has indeed read it all the way through, it’s impossible to imagine they understood it in its totality.

Trump: “I will authorize a Department of Government Efficiency to streamline and reduce the cost of government.”

Also Trump: “I will demand a legislative bill that allocates trillions of dollars we don’t have to a hodge podge of programs and projects that no human being can even begin to get their head around.”

Are there great things in this bill? Probably. Maybe. I don’t know.

Are there horrible things? Inevitably.

Will any two Americans agree on which are which? Not in a million years.

Here’s a suggestion: No bill shall be passed by either House of Congress prior to it being read aloud publicly and without interruption by one of its sponsors—while standing on his or her head.

The last bit is optional, but I think it would have a salubrious effect on the quality of American legislation.

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Hey, Grok, why are so many American "omnibus" bills so long that no one can read them?

American omnibus bills are often lengthy because they combine multiple appropriations, legislative priorities, and policy changes into a single package to streamline passage, especially under tight deadlines like budget or debt ceiling negotiations. This bundling serves several purposes: it consolidates diverse issues to secure broader support, avoids the gridlock of passing individual bills, and leverages must-pass deadlines to push through contentious provisions. However, this leads to bills spanning thousands of pages, as various committees, agencies, and interest groups add provisions, often with little time for review.

For example, the 2022 Consolidated Appropriations Act was over 4,000 pages, covering 12 appropriations bills and additional policies like disaster relief and Ukraine aid. The complexity arises from the U.S. system’s fragmented legislative process, where reconciling House, Senate, and executive branch priorities inflates the text. Last-minute negotiations and earmarks further bloat the bills, while the urgency of avoiding government shutdowns limits scrutiny.

Critics argue this opacity reduces accountability and enables unpopular measures to slip through, but defenders claim it’s a pragmatic way to govern a divided Congress. The sheer volume often means lawmakers rely on summaries or staffers, with few reading the full text before voting.

Count me among the critics.

I would like to ask the defenders, if there are any left, how we can even pretend to be a self-governing republic when our national legislature is routinely cranking out laws no one has even read thoroughly, much less understood.

“Here is our Save the Puppies bill, America. Please urge your Congressional representatives to support this landmark bill to save the puppies!”

“That’s great, I love puppies! What does the bill do to protect them?”

“Why, it establishes a 400 billion dollar slush fund for painting the guardrails on federal highways!”

“How does that help puppies?”

“Congressman Blop had been on the fence, but since there are 1200 miles of guardrails and a lot of unemployed painters in his district, this got his vote.”

“But the puppies. . .?”

“It earmarks 50 billion dollars for inner-city hula hoop programs.”

“For puppies?”

“For Representative Yaya, we needed her vote, too.”

“That all sounds weird. Can I see a copy of the bill?”

“Of course! We’re not hiding anything. In fact, you’re sitting on it!”

“You mean this trunk I’m sitting on contains copies of the bill?”

“I mean the trunk you’re sitting on contains the bill. The first draft. Most of it, anyway. The banker’s boxes over there contain the rest.”

“But that’s got to be thousands of pages!”

“Blop and Yaya ain’t the only ones with needs, you know. You’ve got be realistic about these things.”

“But what does it actually do for puppies?”

“It saves them, dummy.”

“How?”

“Whattaya mean ‘how’? It’s the Save the Puppies bill! It’s right there in the name!”

“Right, but what does it actually do?”

“Does it really matter? I mean, originally it made it a federal crime to hurt a puppy, for example, or at least to kill one—so long as it’s on the approved list of breeds and has never been convicted of a felony—but it’s been in and out of committee so many times, and there’ve been so many edits—and there were questions of jurisdiction and enforcement we had to work out with Justice and the IC, so they wanted some wording changes, and the CBO estimate meant we had to rework the funding model. . . but it’s in there, I guarantee it, I’m just not sure where exactly, or how it’s worded.”

“Why not just write a little bill that saves the puppies and then vote on that?”

“Oh, good heavens, my word!, you poor thing, you have no idea how divided this Congress is. If we try to pass the bill on its own, the opposition will vote it right down.”

“You have the majority in both houses and these votes always end up going by party line anyway.”

“Well, sure, but some of our people are from cat districts and may have to vote against the bill, even though we keep telling them that the whole puppy thing is just one small piece of it, barely anything at all, so we’ve got to lure at least a few people over from the other side of the aisle.”

“So it’s a bill to save puppies that’s hardly about puppies at all?”

“That’s not what I said. You’re paraphrasing. That’s fakes news, buddy. Disinformation. Can it.”

“But if it’s just a few people you need to assuage, why do you need 95 thousand pages in the bill to make them happy?”

“Are you dense? Head injury? You smoking the wacky tobacky? You just don’t understand, kid. Once you add something shiny and fun for this guy, you’ve got to add something nice for that guy. And so on. It adds up. But it’s alright, kiddo, it all works out in the end: we pass this bill, and the puppies are saved!”

“And yet you can’t tell me how.”

“It’s the Save the Puppies bill! What else could it do?”

(Rummaging through the trunk, scanning the first few pages): “It says right here in the description that the bill will create a new federal agency to facilitate the euthansia of puppies.”

“Well, obviously. I mean, if we save all the puppies, which we will, just imagine how many there’ll be! Madness! So it’s just a sensible control. A precaution.”

(Rummaging deeper into the trunk) “What the. . . Good lord! Underneath all these papers there are at least a dozen puppies!”

“Are they moving?”

“No!”

“Whew! Finally! Yeah, well, ‘you can’t make an omelette,’ and so on.”

“Why would you have dead puppies. . .”

“It’s how the sausage gets made, kid. Live with it.”