Only Understood Rights are “True Rights”

Recently Max Baucus Senator from Montana, that’s “Max Baucus” one of the authors of the Healthcare Bill, in a recent statement to the public stated that he has not read the entire Healthcare Bill. He went on to say, in so many words, “Look, I don’t think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the healthcare bill. You know why? It’s statutory language. We hire experts.” –according to GlennBeck.com
If you recall, this echoes John Conyers words, Congressman from Michigan: I love these members that get up and say, “Read the Bill”. What good is reading the Bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you’ve read the bill.

Now, for the moment, I won’t bring up the fact that Conyers, if I’m not mistaken, is a lawyer because that doesn’t make what I’m about to say any less valid.

The real issue lies in the complication of the law that has become the trend of our political generation. This is something that our Founding Fathers did, indeed, warn us against. From The 5,000 Year Leap:

“The Founders were sensitive to the fact that the people have confidence in the law only to the extent that they can understand it and feel that it is a rule of relative permanence which will not be continually changed.”

This is essentially making the case that if a law is to complicated, convoluted, or “masked in form” by its language, that it is, then, a “broken” law. This follows the case that I am about to make—that the only rights you have are the ones which you understand.
To continue, James Madison argued the following:

“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.”

So do you agree with Conyer’s argument that, it would be impossible to understand this bill for the average person because it’s “just that good”, or do you agree with Madison who said a bill so difficult to the understanding of the average man does him no good?
Therefore, the argument that I put forth is this, to restate: The only rights that you truly have are the ones which you understand. This doesn’t mean that you are barred from other rights. It simply means that you must be ready to act upon and/or defend your rights in order to have them. Otherwise what good is a right which is not vigorously defended or understood? To understand a right is to exercise that right.
Allow me to put it another way: Say you go to court for whatever reason. Now, it is within your power to defend yourself without an attorney. But this is the rare exception, rather than the rule. Why? Nearly everyone hires an attorney to act in their behalf. Is this because those without an attorney have less rights that those with one. No. It does, however, mean that the average person’s understanding in the rule of law is limited. Therefore, rights not understood can become rights no longer held. The attorney, then, who has a greater understanding of the law, is able to give you greater rights. But in the case of the Healthcare Bill, an attorney is no longer our representative. It is our representative, or those whom we have voted into office. But if they are now saying, “Who can understand every bill?” then are we now losing our rights, because there are no way of understanding them, anymore? Maybe, and I mean “just maybe”, we should begin simplifying the bills to, say, less than 1,000 pages. And maybe make them easy enough to the understanding that our representatives can read them.
“So why do they make them so complicated. The world’s just that complicated anymore I guess.” I reject this mode of thinking. I believe that there is a more deliberate mode of thought behind this unnecessary complication of things. It has been my experience that when a person has no interest in helping you, that he/she will talk over your head, intentionally present their case in a convoluted fashion, and go on and on in such a manner that you become lost rather quickly. A person who does this usually has within their intentions the goal of getting the upper hand, either to show how intelligent they are and make you feel “small”, or more sinister, their desire is to confuse you so as to distract you from what they are about to do. And nothing to my mind, feels or appears straightforward about this Healthcare Bill. But please, pay attention: it is not just healthcare; consistently the bills coming out of congress of late have been similarly administered—large bills full of speech which only a lawyer could understand. Now, it may be that the subject matter is just that complicated. It may be. But my common sense tells me that it isn’t that difficult to come up with a solution for healthcare reform which handles the crippling costs and other issues surrounding it.