What about the fact that the final bill was only available for 18 hours before Congress voted on it.

Why couldn’t have Congress have waited until after the President’s Day break to vote so that the public would have time to review it ?

Perhaps it’s because they knew that the longer they waited, the bigger the risk that it bill wouldn’t pass.

That’s not transparency I can believe in.

The bill can’t be implemented until Tuesday, therefore there’s no reason not to wait until Monday. Unless you want to pay Federal workers overtime for showing up on their holidays.

Waiting until Wednesday would actually slow down the process. And he’d catch hell for waiting two days in the middle of an economic crisis.

Nick

My opinion is that calling this an “emergency” bill that cannot even tolerate a few days delay for people to understand what is in it or legislators to read it, is complete bullcrap.

The real reason why Obama is violating his presumed principles for “sunlight” on this bill, is so he can have a big PR signing ceremony on President’s Day. It was apparently not that big an emergency that he felt he needed to sign it the day is was passed on Friday. It was not a big enough emergency to sign the bill over the weekend. But it is just enough of an emergency that it must be signed on a holiday Monday, but yet too big an emergency to follow his own sunlight guidelines for a few more days. Did I get the calibration of the emergency right?

I’d like to point out that the conference committee read the entire bill. Everybody else had had weeks to look at the House version, and the changes the conference committee made were apparently quite easy to find and read as they were in handwriting.

And the GOP didn’t seem to have any trouble reading not only the stuff in the bill, but also random emails from other departments. Such as that $30 million for mice BS, and the crazy lady who’s convinced giving doctors more information = ordering them to do stuff.