Dumbassery Rand Paul

Read The Bills. Or Don’t.

One of the first things Rand Paul proposed as a presidential candidate today was a farcical "read the bills" act that would require one day of legislative session to pass for every 20 pages of legislation being considered.

Expressing his outrage that "no one reads them," Rand said we (the Senate) should read "every page" of every bill.

At the proposed rate, we may be able to pass a federal budget sometime in the next decade.

We don't have that kind of time so, fortunately, Rand son of Ron included a loophole in his proposal that amounts to a second form of filibuster.

Paragraph (1) may be waived or suspended only by an affirmative vote of three-fifths of the Members, duly chosen and sworn. All motions to waive under this paragraph shall be debatable collectively for not to exceed 3 hours equally divided between the Senator raising the point for order and the Senator moving to waive the point of order or their designees. A motion to waive the point of order shall not be amendable.

In English, this means a majority of 60 senators -- the same number required to break a filibuster -- could waive Rand's "read the bills" requirement and legislation could be reviewed for less than 3 hours rather than 3 years.

For the purposes of marketing, it was probably a wise choice to refer to this as a "read the bills" resolution rather than a second level of filibuster.

I doubt even Republican primary voters would like the idea of a second filibuster.