Disir
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- Sep 30, 2011
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Anyone looking for legislative text of the Senate’s tax code overhaul this week will be sorely disappointed.
But it should be no surprise, because unlike the rest of Congress — including their counterparts on the House Ways and Means Committee — members of the Senate Finance panel conduct their business in plain English. The conversion to legislative text takes place on the way to the floor.
The longstanding practice was a matter of debate back when the committee, then led by Montana Democrat Max Baucus, went through its 2009 markup of the health care overhaul.
Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning sought to require that before the Finance panel could vote on the bill to be reported to the floor, legislative language be available for 72 hours.
“One of the reasons that this committee uses conceptual language in some of its bills is because we deal with the IRS code,” said Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican whip at the time. “It is very difficult to continually change [or] amend provisions of the IRS code with tables and so on, and easier for us to discuss those kinds of things in conceptual language.”
Kyl’s comments came during a September 2009 debate of Bunning’s proposal to mandate the use of bill text.
A Tax Bill in Plain English? Senate Finance Committee Is Already There
We should get so lucky.
But it should be no surprise, because unlike the rest of Congress — including their counterparts on the House Ways and Means Committee — members of the Senate Finance panel conduct their business in plain English. The conversion to legislative text takes place on the way to the floor.
The longstanding practice was a matter of debate back when the committee, then led by Montana Democrat Max Baucus, went through its 2009 markup of the health care overhaul.
Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning sought to require that before the Finance panel could vote on the bill to be reported to the floor, legislative language be available for 72 hours.
“One of the reasons that this committee uses conceptual language in some of its bills is because we deal with the IRS code,” said Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican whip at the time. “It is very difficult to continually change [or] amend provisions of the IRS code with tables and so on, and easier for us to discuss those kinds of things in conceptual language.”
Kyl’s comments came during a September 2009 debate of Bunning’s proposal to mandate the use of bill text.
A Tax Bill in Plain English? Senate Finance Committee Is Already There
We should get so lucky.
