Of Thousand-Page Laws and Our Republic

Congress is broken. Few are satisfied that our representative system of government is working. As a very important measure, I would point to massive new 2,319 page laws (which weigh more than 12 pounds, printed on both sides of the page). You have to talk yourself into believing that it is O.K. for a new law to be over 2,300 pages long. After all, the Constitution itself is only a couple of pages long—albeit written with a fine hand on large sheets of paper. Perhaps the most important set of laws in the history of man, the Ten Commandments, is only 297 words long (King James Version). And Jesus Christ reemphasized the teaching of the prophets from the Old Testament that even those words and all other laws are summed up in just two commandments:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. (Matthew 22:37-39)

I understand and expect the retort that these are two very different kinds of laws. With that I would agree. The difference is not, however, that the Constitution and the Ten Commandments are foundational principles, while the 2,300 page variety of laws referred to at the beginning of this comment (the new Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law, by the way) is in the way of practical implementation. The Ten Commandments are very much in the way of practical implementation. “Thou shalt not steal” is pretty practical. And the first implementation laws passed by the new Congresses under the new Constitution were not thousands or hundreds or even dozens of pages long. The lengthy laws have developed the farther we have come in time and spirit from our Constitution.

The big difference from the laws of the earlier days of the American Republic and the multi-thousand page laws of today’s Obamacare and Dodd-Frank financial regulation is that when government takes upon itself the task of controlling what people should do, of controlling their daily lives through such things as how to manage their health and their wealth, it takes a lot of words. It only takes a few words to say that it is against the law to maim someone or to rob him. That is to say, it only takes a few words to outlaw crime, but it takes a lot of words to “guide” people in the exercise of their freedom and to turn harmless individual choices (such as which medical procedures you want or how to invest for retirement) into crimes.

Our Republic rests upon the notion that we elect and trust a relative handful of people to represent us in the making of laws, at the federal level just slightly more than 500 people out of more than 300 million. They do the legislative work because it would be impractical for all of us to do it together. They stand in our place, voting for us with authority derived from us, the people.

How can we have a representative government, though, where the representatives pass laws that they do not and cannot read? How can they represent us when they do not and cannot know what they are voting on? Do they not, indeed, fall down on their duty to us when they vote for laws that they have not read? Is not their job made impossible when they are asked to consider laws made up of thousands, or even hundreds, of pages?

That is to say, that our Republican form of government is inconsistent with the kinds of laws that Congress has been passing today (a trend which really got going in earnest during the Congresses of the Depression). Only if our representatives get back to passing short laws that outlaw crime, and abandon efforts to direct the lives of the people, can they really do their job and only then will representative government in America work the way it was intended.