Reading Every Word of Every Bill

Like many things in Washington, the debate about whether legislators should--or can--read every word of every piece of legislation they ever vote on is conducted mainly in abstraction. So I appreciate that the Washington Post in an editorial today actually quantified the problem:

The average college graduate reads about 300 words per minute. Assume that there are about 150 words per page of legislative text, a number we derived from counting the words on a few randomly chosen pages from the Waxman-Markey energy bill. To read all 1,427 pages of Waxman-Markey, it would take at least 12 hours -- tough on a tight legislative timeline. And that assumes that lawmakers can read complex bills at the same pace they do a John Grisham novel (we tried -- it's not even close).

Still doesn't sound too daunting? Consider that in the 110th Congress, the House of Representatives dealt with 7,441 bills and joint resolutions. Not all were as long as Waxman-Markey is -- the average length of laws that the 110th Congress passed was 16.7 pages. Assuming that passed bills were roughly the same size as those that didn't pass, House members would have had to read about 125,000 pages in the last session to get through every bill proposed. And that doesn't even count the 1,978 House concurrent resolutions and House simple resolutions, nor any of the amendments or the different versions of individual bills lawmakers must consider.

Now, I read extremely quickly: 900-page novels are a six-days-in-my-spare-time project, if I'm concentrating hard. But that reading load sounds daunting to me. This seems like another argument in favor of plain-language bills that are extensively and interactively footnoted. If we could save lawmakers from having to wade through references to subparagraphs of old bills and the U.S. Code, they might be able to read, and understand more. I'm not saying we should demand that everyone read everything: that's what staffs and advisers are for. But making the task of wading through legislation easier for everyone is just good sense.