Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

It seems like a no-brainer; of course our lawmakers read the proposed law before they vote on it. Right?

Sadly, they don’t. And given the pathetic state of political discourse in our country, this is a somehow a partisan issue.

A few Congressmen (from both parties) tried to add an amendment to the Health Care bill which requires the final version of the bill be available for 72 hours before the vote. And the amendment failed in committee along party lines!

Health care is extremely important to everyone’s quality of life and is the single largest piece of the U.S. economy. Congressmen voting on a 1,000+ page which overhauls over 10% of the economy without reading it? What on earth could go wrong?

Here are some of the many laws that were passed without anyone reading them:

• Patriot Act (Oct 2001) – voted on and passed even though many paragraphs and pages of the bill still said “to be written”
• $789,000,000,000 Stimulus Bill (Feb 2009) – 1,100 pages long and only available 13 hours before the debate and vote
• House Energy Bill (June 2009) – 1,200 pages long and only available 15 hours before the vote

Remember those large cash bonuses AIG executives got after being bailed out by us taxpayers? Last minute changes to the stimulus bill by Senator Dodd allowed those bonuses to be paid. And other provisions to tax bonuses of bailed out companies disappeared at the last second too. No one knew, since no one actually read the bill.

And that Energy Bill? Turns out that Democrats added 300 pages of amendments at 3 am the night before the vote.

But it’s not just the Democrats forcing bills through without letting anyone know exactly what’s in them. The Republicans forced through the Patriot Act and the Medicare Prescription Drug bill without anyone knowing exactly what’s in them as well.

The solution to this is really simple: voters need to vote out any Congressman that voted for a bill that he or she did not read.

I’ve called my Congressmen before and asked why they vote for bills they couldn’t have possibly read and I’ve heard a number of excuses.

One excuse is that it is very hard to understand the bills since they contain pages of text like “Amend paragraph 4 of subsection (a)(iv) of Subpart C…” Now, while it’s true that the language of the bills is hard to understand, this excuse is stupid. Is it too much to expect our lawmakers to be able to understand laws? Or that they would actually take the time to figure it all out?

These guys are paid over $160,000 a year (not counting all the perks and under the table money) and they aren’t able to do their job? Tell you what, elect me to office and I’ll vote for bills without reading them for half of what you’re paying your current guy.

Another excuse is “we have a crisis and had to act now”. This one is also untrue. For example, it was claimed that the 2009 Stimulus Bill was needed to avert a crisis. But only 20% of the spending in the bill was for 2009. So if it was urgent, the bill should have only addressed the “immediate needs” so that people could read it first.

The last excuse I usually get is “that’s just how things work”. This, again, is just a lame excuse. Everyone goes to Washington and says that they are going to bring “change, transparency, etc” with them. And they all turn out to be liars. If they all voted “no” on bills when they weren’t given enough time to read them, then we wouldn’t have this problem.

A friend mentioned to me that you can’t make the final bill available before a vote, since people keep adding amendments and riders to the bill. It seems like there’s a easy fix here: just declare the bill “final” and don’t allow changes for 72 hours while people are reading it.

I’m curious, does anyone think it’s acceptable for a Congressman to vote for a bill he didn’t read?

I think all Congressmen should have a rule: “If I didn’t read the bill, I vote no.”

In the meantime, we should all have a rule, “If you voted for a bill that you didn’t read, I’m voting for the other guy.”

My team had another nice feature launch today: Data Liberation, “Mark as viewed”, and New! :-)

In addition to all the core feature work, I spent a ton of time making the screenshots. Take a close look (click to see a larger image):

And this one:

I’m so glad my PR team has a good sense of humor. :-)

The first part of my career involved a lot work that normal people don’t really know about. Whether it was my work at Xilinx on the VHDL IDE (specifically on simulation and testbench generation) or my early work at Microsoft on Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, it’s really a small group of people that use those products or understand what they are.

Then, later at Microsoft, I worked on the high-profile, but ill-fated, WinFS project. Pretty much, everyone in the industry knows about WinFS, but most non-computer-dorks don’t because the project was cancelled before it launched.

When I started at Google, I spent a year or so on Web Search, but still didn’t have a great answer when non-engineers asked me, “What exactly do you do at work?” Since the internals of Google Search are a trade secret, it’s tough to describe the specific improvements I made. Let’s just leave it as: search is measurably faster and more relevant thanks to the work my team did. :-)

Next, I started doing a lot of behind the scenes backend infrastructure stuff for Google Apps, which, again, is hard to point to without giving away secrets.

Fortunately though, I recently started working on Google Docs, and we’ve been busy. In fact, this past week, we had two nice feature launches: Shared Folders and more and Doc Previews in GMail.

So, if you were wondering what I do at work all day, now you know. Well, some of it anyway. :-P