New York Post writer John Podhoretz says the defeat of the immigration reform bill was a revolutionary moment in American political history.
But there's something else notable here - something that should gladden the hearts of libertarians and all those who are suspicious of big government. The takedown of this bill is a template for future actions against major pieces of legislation. And like so many templates for action these days, it was made possible by the Internet. Here's how.
This was a "comprehensive" bill, designed to thoroughly "take care" of a thorny problem. It sought to address every important issue relating to immigration - border and employer enforcement, guest workers, legalization and the means by which immigrants can become citizens.
The bill runs more than 400 pages. In its many sections are many innovations and many revisions of existing law. For almost any lay person outside of government, it might as well be written in Urdu - so indecipherable is the drafting language.
That is by design. These bills aren't written by the senators who negotiate them, but by the staffers who work for the senators. And since the bill seeks to "reform" existing laws, a lot of it simply makes reference to those laws and says Word A should be changed to Word B. All of this shields the actual meaning of the legislation from the public, which must rely only on the general summaries of the legislation from politicians.
There was almost no way in the pre-Web era to piece together the actual provisions of reform legislation before it became law. Lobbyists were paid millions of dollars to do just that for panicked business clients - and to get their friends to stick in a few words here or there that would tilt the balance of the new law to benefit them and their clients.
... Now consider what happened with the immigration bill. It was released within minutes of its completion - and it was quickly hacked to bits by paid experts, think tankers, lay thinkers, lawyers and logicians.
Podhoretz says the immigration bill's defeat "suggests that comprehensive bills of all ideological stripes will be susceptible to citizen revolts."
He doesn't say it, but what happened to the immigration reform bill at the national level can just as easily happen to legislation at the state level - if enough people are paying attention, using the Internet to monitor legislation, and applying their own knowledge to track and decipher legislation, identify its weak spots and objectionably provisions, and then distribute their findings via the Internet.
I've seen it happen first-hand in Tennessee, where I live and blog. Actually, I played a role in it...
Two years ago, a group of Tennessee bloggers killed a bad piece of legislation that would have made it easier for county commissions to raise car tag fees (which, in Tennessee, are called "wheel taxes), and would have stripped out of state law the right Tennessee residents currently have to force a referendum on such tax increases.
Bloggers - not the mainstream media's legislative reporters - first reported the existence of the legislation. Bloggers - not the mainstream media's legislative reporters - first explained what the legislation really did, and exposed how the sponsors of the legislation didn't know what the legislation actually did. Bloggers - not the mainstream media's legislative reporters - first reported the source of the legislation (a lobbyist for an association of county executives). Bloggers - not the mainstream media's legislative reporters - educated the sponsoring lawmakers as to the real impact of the legislation.
And bloggers - not the mainstream media's legislative reporters - first reported that the sponsors of the legislation were backing away from the legislation. (The MSM's first report came more than a week after bloggers started chopping away, and that first MSM story reported that the legislation - which the MSM had never informed its readers existed in the first place - was dead.)
Like the immigration reform legislation, the "wheel tax" legislation in Tennessee had bipartisan support and the skids were greased (though, unlike the immigration legislation, the media wasn't paying attention to it). Passage was a done deal - until bloggers started hacking away at the legislation and pointing out the many ways it went against the interests of the taxpayers of Tennessee. (You can read all of my posts on it by going to www.billhobbs.com and entering "wheel tax" in the search box, then scrolling down to the early 2005 entries.)
Bloggers killed the wheel tax legislation.
But that was one piece of legislation - there are thousands of bills filed in the Tennessee General Assembly every year and few get that kind of scrutiny. I'd bet things are no different in every other state capital.
It doesn't have to be that way. There is a vast supply of expertise and intelligence in the general public that can be brought to bear on the legislative process, both nationally and at the state level, by using the Internet to organize the monitoring, research and information-sharing that the mainstream media simply lacks the manpower, and sometimes the willpower, to do.
The conservative side of the blogosphere doesn't need more people writing blogs echoing talking points they find on other blogs, or in the conservative press, or on talk radio nearly so much as at needs more bloggers monitoring politics and policy and the legislative process in their own state legislatures and city councils.
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