Ambivalence Towards ARARA
By visiting OpenCongress – a website I highly recommend to anyone who does or intends to take American politics seriously – I was able to read the full text of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARARA). That is, the pending “stimulus” legislation which recently passed the House and is scheduled for a vote in the Senate as soon as Tuesday.
The first and most obvious problem I have will the bill is the fact that I can barely read it. While certianly my command of the English language is enough to understand every individual word of the text, it’s the particular use and order of those words in the bill that create a problem. And I can’t be alone in this. I wonder how many Americans even know that they have access to the full text of the bill, and for those who do and have tried to read it, how many fully understand it?
While my political orientation tends to align me with democratic (and/or liberal to progressive) politicians and agendas, I am by nature a skeptic and a cynic. As such I do not really trust anyone, particularly politicians, who by their nature are deceptive, or at least regularly lie by omission. This is of not unrelated to the fact that they use legalese – the purpose of which can only be to obfuscate their full intentions.
In spite of any previous ideological alignments, I am wary of the ARARA for at least some of the reasons stated by its primary opposition – the congressional Republicans. Much of the bill does seem to involve issues that are not directly related to economic stimulus, but rather reflect some of the personal agendas of Democratic politicians. Although many of these agendas are ones that I agree with – particularly any funding of education reform – I wonder if these initiatives will directly affect improvements to the national economy. At the same time I wonder why this one bill has been stuffed with so many separate issues, not coincidentally the same issues that congressional Democrats have been pushing for years.
Frankly, the bill might as well be called the Democratic Agenda Act of 2009. My ambivalence comes from the fact that I support much of this agenda, and that, as I said earlier, I am not clear on how closely related those agendas are to economic stimulus.
And finally, given the difficult language and sheer size of the bill, I have to wonder how many senators and representatives have even read it. How many only skimmed the act to find the particular portion in which they were interested? How many didn’t read it at all, but rather relied on word of mouth from a clerk or a colleague to sum it up for them? How many, out of fear of falling out of step with the party, planned to go along with it in any case?
After the bank bailout of 2008, and the PATRIOT Act years prior, we have seen the consequences of the Congress passing massive bills chock full of agendas and sub-agendas that may or may not be related to their publicly stated purpose. And they can be disastrous – leading from a complete violation of Constitutional rights on one hand to a blank check for greedy bank officials on the other.
So for now, as I continue to try to read the full text of the ARARA, I remain ambivalent.
Tags: American, Economy, Government Spending, House, Pork Barrel, Recovery, Reinvestment, Senate, Stimulus, Tax Cuts