PoliticalNews.me - Jul 01,2012 - Senate Votes Against Transparency
Waived point of order that would require Senate to follow the rules, allow proper time to read bills before passage
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Sen. Rand Paul took to the Senate floor to raise a point of order regarding the Senate's violation of Rule 28, paragraph 9, which requires the body to allow 48 hours between public introduction of a conference report and a vote.
Sen. Paul has previously introduced legislation that requires the Senate to allow adequate time to read legislation before its passage.
TRANSCRIPT:
Currently Congress has about a 10 percent approval rate. One of the reasons is we don't even obey our own rules. For goodness sakes, 600-page bill, and I got it this morning. Not one member of the Senate will read this bill before we vote on it.
We're going to vote on this in the next 30 minutes. I and Senator [Mike] Lee (R-Utah) and others will object to this. We'll have a point of order that our own rules say it has to be posted online for 48 hours. Six-hundred pages, no one will read it.
No wonder our approval rating is10 percent. Nobody knows what we're voting on. In fact, things have been stuck in this bill last night that have nothing to do with any of these bills and they have been stuck in and we're just now discovering it.
I passed two Senators in the hall going back to their office, still trying to get out something that's been written in this bill that affects their states that they found out minutes ago. Had they not found out about it, nobody would have known about it.
Three bills that are in question here: transportation bill, student loan bill. The student loan bill, originally we had the loans at 6 percent, and somehow bringing in money to the treasury. We were using that money to pay for Obamacare. Now it's at 3 percent. That money is gone. Where's the money to pay for Obamacare?
We have a shell game up here. We say one things going to pay for it. Now this is going to pay for it. Money disappears.
Now what they're saying is, they are going to pay for this by taking money out of pensions. Raise your hand if you think it is a good idea to underfund pensions more. Over half of the pensions in this country are technically insolvent because they don't have enough money to pay for them.
Is it a good idea to have less money going into workers' pensions to pay for a student loan program? I have a bill in Congress that says we should read the bills before we pass them.
It says that we should wait one day for each 20 pages, so we'd be given time to read 600-page bills. But at the very least we ought to adhere to our own rules. Our rules say that it should be posted online at least 48 hours.
