As of December 23, 2024, during the 118th United States Congress (2023-2024), over 19,000 bills have been introduced. This total includes various types of legislative proposals, such as bills, resolutions, and concurrent resolutions. It's important to note that not all introduce…
As of December 23, 2024, during the 118th United States Congress (2023-2024), over 19,000 bills have been introduced. This total includes various types of legislative proposals, such as bills, resolutions, and concurrent resolutions. It's important to note that not all introduced bills are actively under consideration; many may be in committee, awaiting further action, or have been tabled.
We can divide this number by two to get the annual work load and multiply that by 1000 to get a close idea about the number of pages and multiply that by sixty to get the number of lines and that again by twelve to get the number of words that the members of the USA Congress actually do vote on.
We can see that Congress votes on 200 thousand pages of Law every day they are in session. They are in session two hundred days per year.
In the past year, 2024, the Congress voted into Law some 82 significant legislative actions.
Not one person elected to Congressional office claims to have read any of it.
Some years ago I did some calculations about the bills in the California Legislature. I concluded that so many bills are introduced each year that a legislator working 70 hours per week for the entire legislative session and doing nothing but learning about bills would have just one hour per bill. They honest-to-God don't understand what they're voting on most of the time. Many votes come down to "If you vote for my bill, I'll vote for yours." And industry lobbyists act like they own the state government -- because in effect, they do.
Reality is the only thing that matters.
According to ChatGPT:
As of December 23, 2024, during the 118th United States Congress (2023-2024), over 19,000 bills have been introduced. This total includes various types of legislative proposals, such as bills, resolutions, and concurrent resolutions. It's important to note that not all introduced bills are actively under consideration; many may be in committee, awaiting further action, or have been tabled.
We can divide this number by two to get the annual work load and multiply that by 1000 to get a close idea about the number of pages and multiply that by sixty to get the number of lines and that again by twelve to get the number of words that the members of the USA Congress actually do vote on.
We can see that Congress votes on 200 thousand pages of Law every day they are in session. They are in session two hundred days per year.
In the past year, 2024, the Congress voted into Law some 82 significant legislative actions.
Not one person elected to Congressional office claims to have read any of it.
How do you propose we move forward from here?
Some years ago I did some calculations about the bills in the California Legislature. I concluded that so many bills are introduced each year that a legislator working 70 hours per week for the entire legislative session and doing nothing but learning about bills would have just one hour per bill. They honest-to-God don't understand what they're voting on most of the time. Many votes come down to "If you vote for my bill, I'll vote for yours." And industry lobbyists act like they own the state government -- because in effect, they do.