Congress Should Read Bills Before Voting

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They really need a No-Bill-Stuffing law.

Baird's op-ed was in response to a particularly embarrassing episode, in which someone inserted a provision into the recently passed omnibus spending bill which would have allowed for the staffs of the Republican finance committee chairmen to examine any individual American's income tax returns.

The language understandably provoked outrage from privacy and civil liberties advocates. The funny thing was, after the bill passed and that language became law, no one in the Republican party — not Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, not the bill's sponsors, not the finance committee chairman — seemed to know how the language got there.

A cynic might say that the Republican leadership tried to sneak into law language that would enable them to snoop into the finances of their political enemies, and that they're only feigning ignorance because they've been caught. But I'm not sure the less ominous explanation — that not a single Republican in the U.S. Senate actually read the bill all the way through — is any less embarrassing.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,140204,00.html