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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Long who wrote (76704)	2/23/2003 12:58:54 PM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 281500

Actually, I think the worst thing about the bills Congress passes is that it's actually impossible to read them, because what they typically pass are little pieces that get plugged into bigger laws, but they don't repass the bigger law because that would be a nightmare. So what they vote on are sentences. And the actual code provisions are huge, take up many pages sometimes. So how the hell do you understand how one sentence fits in? You need to sit there with a copy of the existing code and the proposed new code, and go back and forth. Because each code section also references many other code sections, that need to be tied in. And you also have to have a sense of what the entire section means, already. The entire US code takes up dozens of volumes, fills up an entire bookcase. It's not humanly possible for any one human being to know the entire US code. Just as no one human being knows the entire code for Windows, or the entire structure of a jumbo jet. It has to be done by committees. I know a reasonable amount about three tiny bits of the US code, civil procedure, income tax, and civil rights. But I wouldn't venture to actually use it without a specialized legal encyclopedia at my side. Interpretation of the code is another subject that takes up entire encyclopedias. There are actually differing legal philosophies about interpreting code, almost like the difference between being Protestant and Catholic.