Herman Cain (the Republican Presidential Primary candidate for 2011) has gotten some heat lately for saying that he wouldn’t sign multiple-thousand-page legislation bills, and that he would insist upon short, concise, and easy to understand bills that would be no longer than 3-pages. He later backtracked from this quote, claiming that he was taken out of context, and that he meant that they should simply be to-the-point and comprehensible, and that he didn’t really say or mean 3-pages as the rule by which he will decide whether or not to support and/or sign bills sent to him by the legislature.
But I think he made a really big mistake when he waffled on this issue and tried to walk it back to where he cut his own balls off with a pair of left-leaning garden shears. He needs to stand firm on what he’s promised, even if it means literally refusing to sign any bill that is longer than 3-pages! That’s a wonderfully arbitrary and difficult standard to have to meet for a bitterly divided legislature trying to write a new law (and that’s why I like it so much)! It would be absolutely delicious and way more fun to see the coverage of the debates on these bills if they had to condense them to where they no longer had any details or specifics on how the new law would be implemented!
But surely they can jigger around with what constitutes “3-pages”, right? I mean, they have to be 3-pages, but the pages are allowed to be really, really big, like 5’ X 7’, and they can use microscopic 0.1-point-type to write the bill with, so it will technically be only 3-pages long, but it will still be like 3,000 normal, 8.5” X 11” pages written with 12-point, single-spaced type. Hey, when you have to keep a campaign promise, you simply abide by the letter of the law, and redefine all the other parameters to make it fit. But hey, at least he’d be technically keeping a campaign promise, so that’s admirable in a way, I guess. And surely it’s better than nothing, right?
