Legislative Complexity Quotes

Congress is hard to deal with, dealing with, you know, multiple parliaments and commissions and unions and this and that and the other, that's very complicated.

Obamacare is woven into the fabric of health care. It's very hard to just rip it out, as Donald Trump sort of acknowledged with The Wall Street Journal.

As you get larger, it is harder to have focused discussions. Because one of the things I've learned about Congress over the past four years that I've been in is there's no shortage of opinions about how things should be done on any particular subject.

Obamacare is the wildly complex Rube Goldberg contraption it is because getting the legislation through Congress required so many political tradeoffs and so many unavoidable deals with so many vested interests. But that's no excuse.

When Obamacare was introduced, Republicans and Democrats knew the status quo wasn't working. But Republicans rejected the notion that to help 2 million people with preexisting conditions get access to care, we needed a 2,000-page bill that transformed one-sixth of the economy.

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

What I always say with these things, when you're trying to do comprehensive things like tax reform, there will be 20,000 lobbyists in Washington trying to work their will on that piece of legislation so, you know, people think it's going to be a lot easier than it will end up being.

First, the American legislative process isn't well suited to large and complex measures.

The more complicated you make a Constitutional amendment …, the more contingencies for which you provide, the more difficult it is to get it passed.

No one in America fully understands the constantly changing Internal Revenue Code. Agents of the IRS do not, judges do not, congressmen do not, and most assuredly taxpayers do not.

The Statist has constructed a Rube Goldberg array of laws and policies that have institutionalized his objectives. His success breeds confidence in the limitlessness of his endeavors.

Congress and the White House are working out their scheme for pushing through a healthcare 'reform' bill that has more pages than the U.S. Constitution has words. I guarantee you that not a single member of the House or Senate has a complete understanding of that legislation any more than they understood all the implications of the USA PATRIOT Act back in 2001.

Between now and then, after 43 years of European marriage, the whole body of legislation will therefore have to be disentangled. That entails a whole range of specific and very complex questions: what will be the future legal status of the millions of EU citizens in the UK and the millions of Britons on the continent?

What most surprises me about Brazil is the extent of the difficulties that we create for ourselves. We create a lot of legislation to control the Brazilian state itself, that this ends up meaning that things don't go with the speed any head of government would like.

I love these members, they get up and say, 'Read the bill ... What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?'

You do not need to have a 2,400-page bill come out of Washington, D.C.

The fact is, that the treaty-making machinery of the United States has become so complicated as to be almost unworkable. Only by the exercise of great powers of conciliation or of domination by the President, or by awakening and directing upon the Senate a vigorous public opinion, can any progress be made in international relations. A body of ninety-six men of such diverse characteristics and opinions as the members of the Senate is almost hopeless as an executive force. But it is ideal for purposes of obstruction.

Congress is not very good at explaining complex legislation to the public.

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be tomorrow.

It's I politics that men are always aggravating the hopeless tangle of their laws, obscuring the simplest principles and making a mockery of liberty.

We have had on our desks 800-, 900-, and 1,000 page bills. Nobody knows what was in them. No one had read them. No one could.

There are governments who are regulating things in different ways and those forms of regulation often don't square up. So you have a real legislative mess, in the meanwhile various bad people are developing all sorts of tools to exploit the Internet for their own gain and the militaries are beginning to develop some extremely frightening offensive capabilities in cyber. Yet all of this is taking place outside of any international agreement or even framework.

If you ever had the misfortune of reading all 2,000 pages of Dodd-Frank, which I have done - and it almost killed me - basically, all it does is create a list of all the things it wants the Fed to fix.