One of my current work assignments is to review the latest version of the Senate Finance Committee health care bill. The original Chairman’s Mark was written in plain language and weighed in at approximately 200 pages. The new version is over 1,500 pages. The substance hasn’t changed, but the new version of the bill is written in High Legalese. And as Ezra Klein points out, it’s this style of writing that makes legislation so long and difficult to read. Terms have to be defined, different sections of the bill have to cross-reference each other, subsections have to have sub-subsections, and so on and so forth. A sentence’s worth of prose is probably equivalent to a paragraph’s worth of legislative language. Good legislative language can and should be readable, but by its nature it’s long-winded and dry.
And a special plea to Congressional staffers: I really appreciate the fact that you release bills as PDFs, but you might want to consider adding bookmarks to help us navigate through these epic documents. Scrolling through a 1,500 page bill to find a particular section is an exercise in mind-numbing tedium.
I honestly think they should hire, like, three more staffers to put the thing up online, in full HTML, so we can link, cross-reference, etc. It wouldn’t be that hard, right? And we could actually have a piece of legislation that’s SLIGHTLY more accessible to those of us who don’t have time to pore through 1,500 pages of the latest thrilling bill?!