No Law Should Ever Be Longer than the Constitution
The Affordable Care Act — ObamaCare — consists of 2700 pages of new laws and the new immigration bill is about half that size coming in around 1200 pages. This is just the beginning. Once the lawyers, courts, bureaucrats, and later acts of Congress get their greedy vote-begging hands on these new laws there will be no end to what they’ll find in their pages.
The Constitution of the United States was written on four sheets of parchment. If you count the Preamble and all 27 Amendments (remember there were originally only ten), it comes out to 20 typed pages. If you don’t count the signatures and amendments, the document consists of 11 typed pages.
No single Amendment is a full page. Many are only a single sentence in length.
The First Amendment covers a multitude of freedoms: religion, press, assembly, speech, and the right to petition the government. It does it with only 45 words.
Those original four sheets, about 4500 words, were good enough to serve as a document to govern a nation.
Can you imagine a 1200-page immigration bill with similar interpretive powers for Congress and the Courts? Consider how much damage these two governmental branches have been able to do with just four sheets of parchment. What will they be capable of doing with 1200 pages of an immigration bill and 2700 pages of a healthcare bill that will enable them to govern every facet of our lives?
The Constitution takes about 30 minutes to read. The Declaration of Independence has 1,458 words, with the signatures, but is slower reading. It takes about ten minutes of reading time.
I’d be willing to wager that there are some members of Congress who haven’t read either document all the way through.
There’s a very good chance that not a single member of Congress has read the Affordable Care Act or the most recent Immigration bill.
Then there’s the question of who actually wrote these bills? I want a list of names.
We didn’t elect these people, so they shouldn’t be writing our laws.
Here’s a short proposed Amendment to the Constitution: “All laws must be written by those elected to office. If it was good enough for our founders it should be good enough for you.”