2 Nancy Pelosi
The political hashtags of early 2010 were all about health care laws. Democrats were trying to pass the Affordable Care Act through the Senate, and the Republicans weren’t happy. In March, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi remarked:
“But we have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what’s in it.”
That’s not how bills typically work. After a politician sponsors a bill, it is evaluated by a committee. If that committee releases the bill, the House of Representatives debates and votes on it. If it gets enough votes, it moves on to the Senate. There, another committee evaluates it, and if they release it, the bill is once again debated and voted on. If the bill gets through the Senate, a joint committee of House and Senate members reconciles any differences between their respective versions of the bill. The revised bill must then be approved by both the House and the Senate. If that happens, it’s finally sent to the president to either sign or veto. Even a completely incompetent Congress with an unprecedentedly low approval rating would probably know what’s in a bill by the time it’s gone through all of that.
Pelosi has defended her remark, noting that critics take it completely out of context. Opponents of the bill had been accusing it of being about death panels, killing jobs, increasing debt, and so on. The Senate had been failing to produce their version of the bill to be debated against the House’s, and no one knew what they’d end up voting on. The Affordable Care Act was ultimately signed into law by President Obama, without any Republican votes.
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