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The Rules

Recently I read this news item stating that the U.S. Senate Finance Committee had printed up 4,500 copies of a 452-page document with every single word crossed out. The Senate Finance Committee did this on purpose. It wasn’t the kind of situation where they got the document back from the printer and said: “Hey, Every single word in this document is crossed out! We’re going to fire the zitbrain responsible for this!” No. A 452-page document with all the words crossed out was exactly what the Senate Finance Committee wanted.

This news item intrigued me. I said to myself: There has to be a logical explanation for this. So I called Washington, D.C., and over the course of an afternoon I spoke to, I don’t know, maybe 15 or 20 people, and sure enough it turned out there was an extremely logical explanation: The Senate Finance Committee was following the Rules. As well it should. You have to have rules. This is true in government just as much as in sports. Think what professional baseball would be like if the pitcher could just throw the ball right at the batter whenever he felt like it, or the batter could turn around after a called third strike and try to whomp a major cavity in the umpire’s skull. It would be great. I’d buy season tickets. But you can’t have that kind of behavior in your government. This is why, back when we bombed Libya, the Reagan administration made such a large point of the fact that we were not trying to kill Moammar Khadafy. I think most of us average citizens had assumed, since the administration had been going around announcing that it had absolute proof that Khadafy was an international baby-murdering scumball, that the whole point of the raid was to kill him, and although we didn’t want to see innocent persons hurt, we certainly wouldn’t have minded if say a half dozen fatal bombs had detonated inside Moammar’s personal tent.

So I, for one, was quite surprised when right after the raid, President Reagan himself said, and this is a direct quote: “We weren’t out to kill anybody.” My immediate reaction, when I read this statement, was to assume that this was another of those unfortunate instances where the president’s advisers, caught up in the excitement of planning a major military operation, had forgotten to advise the president about it. But then other top administration officials started saying the same thing, that we weren’t trying to kill anybody, and specifically we weren’t trying to kill Khadafy. you following this? We announced we have proof the guy is a murderer; we announce that we are by God going to Do Something about it; we have large military airplanes fly over there and drop bombs all over his immediate vicinity; but we weren’t trying to kill him. You want to know why? I’ll tell you why: The Rules.

That’s right. It turns out that we have this law, signed in 1976 by Gerald Ford, who coincidentally also pardoned Richard M. Nixon, under which it is illegal for our government to assassinate foreign leaders. So we can’t just hire a couple of experienced persons named Vito for 100 grand to sneak over there one night in dark clothing and fill up Moammar’s various breathing apertures with plumber’s putty. No, that would be breaking a Rule. So what we do is spend several hundred million dollars to crank up the entire Sixth Fleet and have planes fly over from as far away as England, not to mention that we lose a couple of airmen, to achieve the purpose of not killing Moammar Khadafy. We did kill various other random Libyans, but that is OK, under the Rules. Gerald Ford signed nothing to protect them.

OK? Everybody understand the point here? The point is: You have to follow the Rules. Without Rules, you would have anarchy.

And that is exactly why the Senate Finance Committee had to print up 4,500 copies of a 452-page document with every single word crossed out. What this document was, originally, was the tax-reform bill passed by the House of Representatives. It seemed the Senate Finance Committee didn’t like it, so they wrote a whole new bill, with all different words. Their new bill is 1,489 pages long. Also they wrote another 1,124 pages to explain how it works. (Sounds like our new reformed tax system is going to be mighty simple, all right! I can’t wait!)

OK So the Finance Committee had 2,613 pages worth of tax reform to print up, but that was not all. They also printed the entire House bill, the one they rejected, with all the words crossed out to show where they disagreed with it. According to the 15 or 20 people I talked to on the phone, the committee had to do this. I asked them if maybe it wouldn’t have been more economical, and just as informative, if the Finance Committee had stuck a note on the front of their bill saying something like: “We thought the whole House Bill was pig doots and we chucked it,” but the 15 or 20 people assured me that, no, this was not possible, under the Rules. I was skeptical at first, but I heard this same explanation over and over, all afternoon, from people who all sounded like very bright college graduates, so that by the end of the day I was beginning to think that, yes, of course, it made perfect sense to print 4,500 copies of a document with every word crossed out. I felt like a fool for even bothering to think about it.

By the way: This document is for sale. This is the truth. You can actually buy a document that your government has used your tax money to print up with all the words crossed out. It’s called HR 3838 As Reported in the Senate, Part 1.

The Government Printing Office is selling it for—I swear—$17. So far they have sold 1,800 copies. And I don’t even want to know who is buying them. I am sure that whoever they are, they’re going to claim every single cent they spent on these documents as a tax deduction. But I don’t care. I’m through asking questions.

I also don’t want to know how much we spend each year for the upkeep on Richard M. Nixon.