James J. Kilpatrick Quotes
There isn't a guy [Congressman] up there [Capitol Hill] who knows what's in this bill.
Referring to a new, complex tax bill that Congress had just passed:
James J. Kilpatrick, Syndicated Political Columnist, Inside Washington, October 15, 1988
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
In general, there are so many versions of a bill as it goes through the Congressional process, that the members of Congress do not read each and every draft. Some do not read any of the drafts and leave it to the Committee; others trust their staffs or their party leadership. More often they trust the lobbyists who donate to their campaigns. Sometimes, the bills are so large—many thousands of pages that the members of Congress lose track of all the aspects of the proposed law and only read a few sections in which they may have participated in debate. Often, the only people who read the entire bill are the lobbyists and one or two of committee staff.
His main reason for believing this is that all appropriations bills must be initiated by the House of Representatives. Lobbyists therefore often give the House more attention than the Senate.
If a party controls one of the two houses of Congress, they can block any legislation. But governing involves passing legislation, and in our bi-cameral Congress, control of one house is not sufficient to pass legislation.
At the time, most members never read the bills they voted on, though some tended to read earlier versions. The bills were very long—sometimes as long as 2000 pages. Usually a few members of Congress worked with Congressional Staffs and lobbyists to finalize bills. It was believed that the lobbyists were the only people who read the entire bills in all their versions.
Congress keeps passing rules to prevent overspending and unbalanced budgets. Then they cleverly find loopholes in their own rules or in cases like the Iraq War and Prescription Drug coverage, whoever controls the Congress decides to n spend the money but not count it as an expenditure so they will not spend more than the rules allow. Except that they do.
James Jackson Kilpatrick was an American newspaper journalist, columnist, author, writer and grammarian. During the 1950s and early 1960s he was editor of The Richmond News Leader in Richmond, Virginia and encouraged the Massive Resistance strategy to oppose the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in the Brown v. Board of Education ruling which outlawed racial segregation in public schools. For three decades beginning in the mid-1960s, Kilpatrick wrote a nationally syndicated column "A Conservative View", and for years also sparred with liberals Nicholas von Hoffman and later Shana Alexander on the television news program 60 Minutes.
