[2006alum]

Well, this is the same gang that tried to overhaul the Healthcare system with a bill nobody saw before voting on it.

This is a serious structural problem with all major legislation today. Any bill that is more than a few pages long is unlikely to be able to be read closely by those voting on it. (And if you want my candid view, many of them don't have the critical reading skills or training to glean all that much from it anyway.) That's where committees and legislative drafting staff are incredibly important, for they are the ones to distill what the bill does. Hoyer has promised House members 24 hours to review the Senate bill; given everything else going on in the world right now, what House member can read and digest 300+ pages in under a day. This is especially problematic given how much of our legislation in recent years, including this bill, has been passed in a rush, behind closed doors, with an unstable coalition that could crumble at any minute and that therefore requires bypassing ordinary committee proceedings. 

I am totally sympathetic to the aghast skepticism of "we need to pass it so you can see what's in it," but when you've seen how the sausage gets made you'd realize how much less feasible it is do always do that in the era of such extreme partisanship. Folks lament how polarized our country has become at the community level, but it also makes crafting quality legislation damned near untenable because of both parties' incentives to sink the other's handiwork at all costs.

[2006alum]

Well, this is the same gang that tried to overhaul the Healthcare system with a bill nobody saw before voting on it.

This is a serious structural problem with all major legislation today. Any bill that is more than a few pages long is unlikely to be able to be read closely by those voting on it. (And if you want my candid view, many of them don't have the critical reading skills or training to glean all that much from it anyway.) That's where committees and legislative drafting staff are incredibly important, for they are the ones to distill what the bill does. Hoyer has promised House members 24 hours to review the Senate bill; given everything else going on in the world right now, what House member can read and digest 300+ pages in under a day. This is especially problematic given how much of our legislation in recent years, including this bill, has been passed in a rush, behind closed doors, with an unstable coalition that could crumble at any minute and that therefore requires bypassing ordinary committee proceedings. 

I am totally sympathetic to the aghast skepticism of "we need to pass it so you can see what's in it," but when you've seen how the sausage gets made you'd realize how much less feasible it is do always do that in the era of such extreme partisanship. Folks lament how polarized our country has become at the community level, but it also makes crafting quality legislation damned near untenable because of both parties' incentives to sink the other's handiwork at all costs.