One New Law Every Other Day? No Wonder the President Broke His Promise!
One of the promises President Obama made America while he was on the campaign trail was the “Sunlight before Signing” promise wherein he said he would “not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days”. He promptly broke that promise twice in the first three weeks of his reign and 118 times in 124 chances his first year.
But, according to the Cato Institute, which has been keeping track, the President has been slowly getting better. He’s keeping his promise with about 1 out of 4 bills on average now (after a blistering rate of 54 percent in the first seven months of this year).
I’m not inclined to hit the President very hard on this promise even though it was the first one he broke and it was entirely within his control to keep. I don’t think he knew what an immense job posting all the bills that Congress shoveled his way would be. Let’s do some math on the numbers in the Cato article.
In 2009, Congress sent an average of 10.3 bills to the White House every month, or, approximately one bill every three days. That sounds like fast work, but it’s even faster than you might think. Remember that Congress is not in session all year and that 2009 featured such contentious legislation as the Vote Buying Act Stimulus Bill and the beginning of the Obamacare debate. If we look here, we see that both chambers of Congress were in session for a total of 350 days in 2009. If we double the number of bills sent to the White House (because each chamber has to consider each bill), it works out to one bill every 1.4 days.
In other words, Congress churned out a new pile of bureaucracy once every day and a half it was in session. The only times during the year we were safe from its sausage machine of new spending, taxes, regulation, or proclamations were when our members of Congress shut down the machine and issued forth like a plague upon the land to wave their accomplishments among us.
At that rate, it’s no wonder the President could only get a small portion of the bills online for us to read before he signed them. If members of Congress couldn’t be bothered to read the bills before they passed them what hope did the President have to get them up for us to read before the next one thundered onto his desk? The guy was signing bills like Lucy on the chocolate factory wrapping line.
P.S. How are we doing this year, you might ask? Well, Congress is on pace to beat 2009′s bill-passage pace by 28 this year, which roughly works out to almost 13 bills a month. At that rate, they have no ground on which to gripe about obstructionist Republicans.
Other Posts of Interest:
- What Happened to the President’s Economic Emergency?
- Pressing on a Campaign Promise
- Why Are We Shocked That the President Broke A Promise He Had No Power to Keep?
Category: Our New Democratic Overlords, The Republican Minority, The Rise of the Nanny State
