Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier by David B. Edwards

Author:David B. Edwards [Edwards, David B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780520916319
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 16337944
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 1996-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

Which Ideas Become a Law?

8

I’m Just a Doomed Bill

The House of Representatives

An asteroid slammed into earth. Not while you were reading this, so no need to panic, but sixty-six million years ago. You probably know the asteroid I’m talking about, because this was the big one. It wiped out the dinosaurs, sent flaming radioactive particles zooming across the planet, and blotted out the sun so that no plant could grow. And here’s the thing to keep in mind: according to the latest scientific estimates, a species’ odds of surviving the most cataclysmic extinction of the last hundred million years was better—more than ten times better—than the odds of a bill becoming a law in America today.

Bills are not just imperiled. They are far more imperiled than they used to be. In the 100th Congress, the first full legislative session of my life, 7 percent of introduced legislation passed both the House and Senate. In the 1990s, Congress approved about 5 percent of bills, a number that dropped to 4 percent in the 2000s. During the 2010s, Congress approved just 2 percent of new proposals, its lowest rate in half a century. To say today’s legislative process turns bills into laws is like saying the veal industry turns calves into cows. We don’t pass bills. We kill them.

But let’s not tell this to the adorable cartoon scroll gazing up the Capitol Building from its steps. It’s easy to imagine a Bill Jr. picking up where his old man left off, but since this is 2020, we’ll give our “I’m Just a Bill” reboot a female protagonist. Let’s call her Belle. Belle the bill, with her dreams and ambition and her heart full of song, has just arrived in Washington. And she is almost certain to die.

The next few chapters are about exactly how Belle will meet her demise. (If you’re an optimist, I suppose you could also say the next few chapters are about how she’ll live, but you’ll probably be disappointed.) We’ll start with Congress—first the House, then the Senate—followed by a look at the people who can kill legislation despite not being legislators themselves.

At every point in Belle’s journey, we’ll see how the way bills survive directly affects which bills survive. The rules of basketball give tall people a big advantage; the rules of soccer favor those with nimble feet. So who do the rules of our legislative hunger games favor? Which kinds of bills will be left standing?

If Capitol Hill were a true meritocracy of ideas, Belle’s low odds might not necessarily be a bad thing. Every year, lawmakers propose thousands upon thousands of pieces of legislation that are useless, terrible, or both. Not to be overly callous, but those bills deserve to die. Survival of the fittest would ensure that bad ideas were weeded out while good ones had nothing to fear.

This naturally raises an important question: when it comes to legislation, who decides what “fitness” really means? There’s no perfectly objective method for separating good bills from bad.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.