on style & the omnibus
You know group projects, right? The bane of high school and college careers, the worst kind of assignment. Reports and powerpoints and even papers written by six people thrown together by fate and the ill will of teachers. The trial of reconciling the research and writing of all group members into one finished product. Well, almost all members. Every group had that one who wouldn’t pull their weight…
And you know that particular style of writing, right? Which is to say no style and every style; the museum–of–modern–art eclectic hodge–podge that results when everyone writes their own section of the paper and ignores everyone else. Oxford comma, no Oxford comma, first person, third person… the cacophony of voices. You can tell that Bobby wrote pp. 1–2, that Jimmy wrote 3–4, that Danny wrote 5–6. No proofreading, no spellchecking, no consistency. Somebody just took all the separate docs — ctrl+c — ctrl+v — et voila. You’re lucky it’s all in the same font.
That’s how the latest House coronavirus bill reads to me.
I don’t mean the formatting on the page, which is equally horrible for all draft bills. I don’t even mean the boilerplate language, the unending provisos. The bill is appropriation after appropriation; it’s gonna be a lot of the same followed by a lot more of the same. Repetition here means all your bases are covered. Consistency is a comfort. I mean all the little tics, the little changes in voice. When consistency in language is just a copy/paste away, irregularities stand out. And this bill is so clearly the un–smoothed–over work of many hands.
Take how the bill refers to the virus itself. Most of the time it’s simply called “coronavirus.” Sometimes, though, it’s “Coronavirus Disease (COVID–19).” Other times, it’s “the novel coronavirus (COVID–19).”
Sometimes Congress is referred to as “the Congress.” Other times the Congress is simply called “Congress.” Usually the money is appropriated generally “to prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus,” unless it’s “to prevent, prepare for, and respond to the coronavirus.” And, occasionally, the money is “to prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus, domestically or internationally.”
Now, I don’t imagine for a moment that any bill is written by one person alone these days — let alone a massive omnibus like this. And I don’t expect all the tiny bits and bobs to be in just the right place— except— wait… I do. I’m troubled that all the folks who wrote this thing weren’t agreed on the basic questions of 1. what to call the virus and 2. what to call (the) Congress. I’m troubled by every missing comma and every article that vanishes and reappears. The lack of proofreading is no small matter. As the infamous Oxford comma case showed, the smallest grammar questions are quite significant when applied to the law of the land. Someday, will an agency be found to have used coronavirus money improperly because of a crucial missing modifier like “domestically or internationally?” Courts are reluctant to speculate on the intentions of (the) Congress. They assume the plain text is intentional, which it should be. If one replies that the bill is just too big, or written to quickly, to maintain consistency, that seems like an argument for separate smaller bills and a more deliberate time–table — not an argument for the hastily–written omnibus.
I can only hope that someone has checked over the numbers more carefully than they have the words. The difference between $1,000,000 and $10,000,000 — or $100,000,000 and $1,000,000,000 — is a stiff price to pay for an accidental keystroke.
What’s true of all bills handed down by the leadership is true here as well: that for as many people who must have been involved in its drafting, so few of them were Members of the House. It’s not so bad that the bill is the work of a policy shop, but that it’s the work of the Speaker’s shop alone. Bring it to the floor with a closed rule, and there you have one of the great perversions of deliberative legislation in this country. Take a look at the number of bills shoved into the package, and it’s that many times worse. So many reams of paper sent out the door with the count of a single vote.
In the Speaker we find another kind of undesirable group member: the far–too–serious group leader, who doesn’t lead the discussion so much as dominate it, who holds such a grip on the project that they won’t brook adjustments — even just to wording or grammar. With that kind of leader, how could there ever be discussion of substance? Members are howling to have a more active role; current results only confirm their complaints about process. Our consensus politics are at their best a successful group project. No one dominates, everyone participates, and the final product speaks with a unified voice.