On the recordFebruary 24, 2010
The funny thing is, a number of us have served in legislative bodies for a number of years. One of the rules has always been the public never pays any attention to the process of how we go about passing legislation. You can complain about different stuff like we had a bill that was done here, where we had a choice of voting for either a big tax increase or voting for a cost of living and we had to take a choice between the two. The process or the procedure there is unfair. Anyway, we got this bill here, 300 pages of amendments passed at 3 o'clock in the morning, and we're here on the floor. The Congressman from Texas, he has sort of the sense of humor of Eeyore, and he just asks in this plaintive kind of way, is it normal procedure that we have a copy of the bill on the floor when we are going to be debating a bill? ... Finally he says, I've come up to the podium, and the place where you say there is a copy of the bill there isn't because the Clerk is still trying to stick 300 pages of amendments in this bill. So here we are passing a bill that doesn't even exist.
