On March 8, 2017, then Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price introduced the latest alternative to the Affordable Health Care Act in what had become something of a trope, comparing it side by side by length with the original.  It was a comparison that had become increasingly stark over the years–the first time the GOP introduced an ACA alternative, in November of 2009, it ran to 219 pages, as opposed to “Nancy Pelosi’s 1,990 page government takeover of health care,” and, eventually, the 906 pages of what was ultimately passed. By 2017, the chasm had become a canyon, with a Republican version whittled down to “about a hundred pages” while the Democratic status quo had ballooned to “more than 2,400″ pages in length.  Similarly, when it was time for Wall Street to be punished for its sins, the Dodd-Frank Act clocked in ready to clock at 849 pp.; if nothing else, dropped from a great height over lower Manhattan, legislators could be assured it would reach a terminal velocity that would truly be terminal.

You might think that a Republican administration, the Trump administration in particular, would be the last to brag about anything of theirs being “smaller” or “shorter.”  But the other side of the aisle left them no choice.  It had been baked in since Day One that whatever passed had to be a “comprehensive” “overhaul,” and to that end, producing anything less than a couple of Gs of inked paper for the Congressional printing press to run would result in a loss for words fatal to the health care system. A bill of one hundred pages or less was, by contrast and definition, unserious and sophistical.

Part of our Thought Experiments series, in which, like Einstein riding on a beam of light, we imagine a world with one element of the status quo changed–higher education without student loans, health care without insurance, a global economy without money (or Saudi Arabia)–and discuss whether/how it could be better than today. Have an idea for something you’d like to pluck from terra not-so-firma to see how the universe responds?  Let us know–we’ll collaborate/support you in your multiverse…

The legendary Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes was fond of saying, “three things can happen when you pass the ball and two of them are bad.”  Though in fairness, you may want to toss our quoting Hayes onto the same reality distortion field as Trump letting the words “short” or “small” pass his lips without an enemy in his sights. The Man was a proto-MAGA advocate for the “three yards and a cloud of dust” offense who was driven from the sport for punching an opposing player in the jaw, while one of the two original founders of our enterprise was born in Royal Oak, MI, of a father who would soon get his Ph.D. at That School Up North.¹

But when it comes to lengthy legislation, there are, we believe, four things that can happen and all of them are bad.

• At the current rate of change in the world, the detailed command-and-control prescriptions such tomes always contain are out of date long before the final document is printed, let alone when its ink dries.
• The level of detail involved mainly serves to clearly outline the best ways to get around whatever the bill is attempting to achieve
• The length of such bills, in combination with the flowery bureaucratese that contributes, daunts the public, discouraging we, the people, from carrying out the responsibilities of citizens in a democracy to critically scrutinize the work of our elected representatives so as to determine whether it’s worthy of our support–and fealty, should it become law.  Instead, we sense, almost strongly enough to taste, an unsettling patina, a flavor from the kitchen we can’t quite place, acidifying already discomfiting uncertainty into regurgitated mistrust.
• Furthermore, our gut reaction is right–because such legislation is the ideal vehicle for stuffing with special pleadings and sweetheart deals, a yeast that riddles such bills’ foundations with air pockets and alveoli.

Fortunately, there’s a deceptively simple remedy, limiting the length of bills, that would compel cascading benefits for the legislative process, its results, and how it’s perceived by both special interests and the American people at large, resulting in more buy-in, more compliance and, ultimately, greater efficacy.  Anyone who has filled out an application for federal employment via the infamous SF-171, submitted a grant proposal, or had the temerity to propose surveying constituents to find out what they want, knows that if there’s one thing our government excels at, it’s limiting, by rule and rulers, count and calibration, the amount of information and input from the citizenry it has to process, and they know every not-so-stupid computer trick you might try to get around their diktats. We say it’s time for Congress to be subject to the same level of self-discipline as the rest of us when it comes to producing work product for federal consideration.²

Page limits would force bill writers to be clear and concise or risk failure–if not in getting their desired legislation through Congress, then certainly when it comes to acting on or enforcing its provisions.  In fact, it would likely compel the wonks to start writing in plain English that the average American–who reads at a 7th-8th grade level–can understand. In fact, English would become policy’s new lingua franca, if not its official language; there’s plenty of existing software that can be used to enforce such a requirement at the appropriate level of social promotion.³

Clarity and concision, in turn, will make what’s being proposed comprehensible to we, the people, replacing the rank odor of a political meatpacking plant with the fresh breeze of change, and lest you think that’s too optimistic, read on, because that’s only the most superficial in the array of potential bennies we can foresee.  The great music composition teacher Nadia Boulanger⁴ was fond of saying “the greatest creative freedom can be found within boundaries.” Little did she know that the legislative process was what she was talking about.

Clichéd as it may be, we live in a big data world–there are metrics for everything, and where they don’t exist they can easily be created.  Harvard Business Review has gone so far as to declare that “data scientist” is the 21st century’s sexiest job.  Putting page limits on legislation will force legislators to become less prescriptive, more aspirational, goal-oriented–and goals and metrics will always take up a lot less space than high-flown bureaucratese. We were all raised listening to the “inchworm song“ so we get it–not everything of value can be measured–but legislation is about effecting change, and given the challenges we face and the velocity with which they’re mounting, we need to start cutting out the middlewords and go straight from problem to resolution, visualizing and building the resolution into the problem wherever possible.

Are there potential laws sitting out there like Plato’s ideal forms or Michelangelo’s sculpture in the stone, programmatic initiatives that could have merit, yet can’t be reduced to milestones and metrics? We’re skeptical, but also self-aware of the consultant’s creed (“sometimes wrong, never in doubt”)—so we’re eager to have you try us in the comment section below; we’ll give a free t-shirt from the store we’re building to anyone who can come up with a law that can’t be reduced what we believe should be policy’s new x’s and o’s, 1s and 0s–goals and the metrics to measure the metamorphosis that becomes the law’s final form.

Yet if you do succeed in stumping us chumps, well, to paraphrase the world’s most common t-shirt caption, with adlar we hope all you get is our stupid t-shirt.  As far as we’re concerned, most, if not nearly all, legislation that’s not fundamentally metric-based and result-focused shouldn’t be passed at all. For the foreseeable future, if Congress isn’t 100% focused on effecting change, it’s just wasting time we no longer have.  If it feels we need to treat changes to post office names and the like with the same gravitas as the answers to our prayers, the gentlemen/women should, instead, follow the lead of the Oscars and make some other time⁵ to do so. The young, in particular, a.k.a. our future, don’t want or need to see 1,000 page pieces of legislation as proof of our industry on their behalf; they’ll call BS, maybe even BT, and they’ll be right.  They know a thousand Dodd-Franks, even all collated and bound together, will still be nothing but stray foliage tossed like recycled plastic bags in the increasingly volatile atmosphere of climate change alone; not so big or weighty after all.

Industry, and more broadly, stakeholders in general, are always saying they want to police themselves.  In our little gedankenexperiment, with limited real estate available on paper for command and control, our representatives would be compelled to delegate authority like real 21st century managers, and let the real players prove they can deliver. Give them metrics they’ve developed and bought into, in collaboration with the American body politic at large, that must be met or penalties will fall like kale–the bigger the company or stakeholder, the harder the fall, progressively or disproportionately, so they’ll be properly incented to lead. ‘Ask’ them to step up into the breach the way we did–and they did–the last time we were in existential crisis, when nearly three hundred CEOs took over, built, and ran the “arsenal of democracy” for salaries of $1/year each. The consequences of failure then–and they knew it–were the destruction of democracy and the American way. The same is true today, compounded by the evisceration–on a spit–of the planet as we know it.

That said, no space on these pages should be made available for the purpose of codifying the precise consequences of failure–as (momentarily) gratifying as this world’s smallest power trip might be to the little bureaucrat in us all. As with overdetermined legislation in general, lawmakers will find such “regimens,” or even mere “guidelines,” to be straitjackets when exposed to the elements of the real world, the chaotic dance of the variables, at which point they will be compelled to hollow penalties into potemkins, code into caricature, resulting in exactly the contagion of rising gorge among the populace we were trying to remedy.

Furthermore, and more importantly, it’s better that corporate decision-makers not be able to go through their usual actuarial calculi and mathematical gymnastics, which seemingly inevitably conclude that all financial penalties, specified in advance to any degree, levied for violating we, the people, are an acceptable cost of business, largely because they are predictable and can therefore be built into financial models, models that even often succeed in passing them right back onto those they’ve harmed (and have been compelled to compensate). Instead, let them imagine the worst, like the rest of us have to do every day.

Stakeholders, especially businesses, hate uncertainty–it’s why Andorra, Bhutan, and Lichtenstein are the only countries in the world we haven’t sent troops into, and that may only be because we couldn’t find them on a map.  It’s the only condition under which we used to have the masters of the universe by the short hairs, before they all started oiling and waxing; in fact, to ensure there’s real, ‘past is prologue’ potential for ‘costs of business’ that could really sting, such determinations of accountability should consistently involve the citizenry directly via the civil justice system or its equivalent, not left in the hands of bureaucrats–executive or judicial–who can be bought off or otherwise captured.

Beyond this, because the stakeholder community assumes ownership to a much greater degree in our model than is the case with traditional privatization (which has mainly produced sickly chimerae wandering in public-private no-man’s land, ratcheting up costs in every direction⁶), our much simpler approach has real potential to do what privatization has not: reduce the size of government and the share of our economy and resources it commands, hopefully putting more of those resources in the hands of those who can make best use of them: the 99 percent.

If you’re a lefty fellow traveler old enough to be experiencing too-good-to-be-true five-year-plan PTSD right about now, commence au désensibilisation. Only in the funhouse world of partisan politics does what we’re talking about look anything like central planning–or laissez-faire, for that matter. The Soviet model failed—as China’s is failing today—for reasons that no longer generally apply in an advanced market economy, including:

• A general lack of information the market would normally provide, which, nevertheless, had to be generated somehow on some basis for the purpose of measurement
• A lack of independent information—too often those being measured had to generate the measurements themselves, a state of affairs ripe for conflicts of interest, self-dealing, and corruption, which is exactly what’s occurred.
• As a result of said lack of quality information, overly prescriptive metrics, which, in turn, have consistently resulted in overly prescriptive goals.

By contrast, while the information available to us is far from perfect and, we now know, at the most fundamental level, it never can be, today our rising seas are preceded, even led, by floods of data, to the point where many of us are drowning in it.⁷ There is no shortage of available information, no shortage of independent information,⁸ and therefore no reason to prescribe based on what we know–or at all; we live, instead, in an age in which induction, not deduction, should be the coin of the realm. Goals can be set at extremely general (and increasingly lofty) levels as the aforementioned sexy data scientists continually crisscross and cross-reference increasingly rapidly unspooling threads of data into webs and nets (aka “advanced metrics,”aka justice) capable of catching the wiliest gamesters–while sparing the most faultless and providing guidance to all–throughout the evolutionary flowering of the living law. At a minimum, we should be able to replace Pascal’s Wager with the Parents’ Prayer: Lord, we know we’re bound to make mistakes, but let them not be the same ones.

Which brings us full circle to where we started, to the “yeah, but,” a.k.a. the ACA.  As surely as 100,000+ pages of tax code can’t really be distilled onto a postcard postmarked 4/15, there’s no physics, no alchemy, political or otherwise, through which landmark legislation like Obamacare can be tailored to fit on… let’s say five pages.  And therefore page limits are a terrible idea because they prevent us from addressing any of the major problems we face…right?

Not so fast.  First of all, the model example that’s supposedly the ‘asked and answered’ snapping shut the book on what we’re proposing–i.e. the ACA–had the objectively insane idea of overhauling every aspect of one fifth of our economy at once. Seriously, is there an analog to this outside the halls of Congress, other than mass extinction events and the bottom ten revolutions of all time (Russia, China, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, Ethiopia, etc.)? A reassuring analog?

And the mantra that was supposed to allow us–compel us–to walk confidently through this valley of death panels?  Was that we had no choice but to touch every part of the system if we wanted to touch any of it, because of the bargain at its core: insurance companies would only insure the uninsured if every American was required to purchase insurance (or pay a tax for not doing so).  We couldn’t have the carrot without the stick, we were told.

Well, it’s now been nearly five years since a federal district judge declared the so-called “individual mandate” unconstitutional, nearly four years since an appeals court agreed, and the ACA…is still with us. More importantly, the insurance exchanges that supposedly would collapse without the mandate are still with us.  40.2 million Americans have health insurance, thanks to the ACA, a 30% increase since 2021, and a 219% increase since 2014.  Of those who now have coverage, nearly 40% have it via the insurance exchanges that were supposed to have cratered by now. Now, maybe the individual mandate was never anything more than a ruse we had to employ with the insurance companies because Obama lacked the persuasive powers of Sam-I-Am, but a lot of very serious people seemed awfully sincere about the actual actuarial necessity of the bargain at the time.

So let us commit one final sacrilege against every sausage factory ritual our deliberative legislative bodies hold holy: maybe we shouldn’t be passing bills like the ACA.  Or Dodd-Frank.  Or Build Back Better.  Or the Green New Deal.  OK, maybe we had to pass the ACA, but why? Because presidents dating back to Truman in the 1940s had focused their efforts at reform on one big idea: universal health insurance coverage.  And while there were plenty of good reasons for this, the net result was that the system remained fallow, fundamentally unchanged, for decades.  Is it any wonder that, like a forest in which no effort is made to clear or even manage the understory, enough political kindling built up that when Barack Obama became the nth leader to try to move the needle–with a solution originated in the Heritage Foundation and modeled on the work of the Republican governor who would challenge his re-election–a conflagration was all but inevitable?  We once had to fight a war in which 40-50 million people died because we allowed grievances to fester and an evil authoritarian movement to rise up in multiple countries over the course of two decades while we played “America first” in splendid isolation.  So maybe after arguably a century or more of neglect (certainly from the perspective of our citizens of color–and women, too), we had no choice than to roll the dice with something like the ACA.

But for God’s sake, let us learn something from the experience.  The two presidents in the last century who moved Build Back Better-sized mountains were Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson (sorry, Ronnie).  The Great Society wasn’t a bill–it was dozens, if not hundreds of them.  So was The New Deal.  When we founded Creative Politics, one of our driving motivations was the disconnect we saw between the dynamism and innovation of the private sector versus the stagnation of government.  When Republicans and New Democrats cry out that government needed to “run more like a business,” we agree wholeheartedly, but having spent decades as part of the most dynamic and innovative part of the economy, we believe our government and its critics consistently miss the most important differences we see between the public and private sectors.

Typically, it’s believed that cost and efficiency is the biggest difference between the two; hence the disaster of privatization.  To us, a much bigger one is that businesses are highly iterative, and government is not.  A business would never have reached the point where an ACA was necessary, because a business would have taken up health care reform every year for the last century; it would have been taking a look at the steps it had taken in the past and been making adjustments to them–we aren’t Russia; goals and metrics should change in evidence-based ways over time–and no one would be calling anyone else a “flip-flopper” for doing so.

Meanwhile, while millions more Americans are insured thanks to the ACA, it’s also abundantly clear we either swung and missed or took–and keep taking–strikes over the heart of the plate with regard to health care issue after issue, challenge after challenge our ailing system faces.  In many ways, in fact, our system is in far worse shape than it was before the ACA (eg we’re currently projected to have more than 2 million fewer nurses than we need by 2031), which is not the ACA’s fault, of course, but most certainly is the fault of the “go big or go home” “all or nothing” mentality that led to and produced it.

We believe that deep down, underneath all the ritual combat they go in for, our representatives understand this; many came from the private sector, after all.  During the 2020 presidential contest, we started a campaign called Bill Of The Day. Its original purpose was to help blow up Donald Trump’s efforts to paint himself as a modern Give’ Em Hell Donnie running against a “do nothing” Congress, not just by pointing out the sheer number of bills the Democrat-controlled House had actually passed—a meaningless abstraction, as every post-modern Republican since Stalin has known—but by highlighting one–and only one–of these bills every day until the election, a drip, drip, drip initiative to keep the truth in front of voters without overwhelming them.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Capitol. What began as a defensive reflexive reaction to breathtaking mendacity and cynicism became something more like an evidence-based case for profound hope, which is why we’ve recently revived it and would encourage you to check in on it whenever you’re down and out, feeling small. It turns out that all but a trumpful of the 1500+ bills the House has passed since 2019, sponsored by Democrats and Republicans alike, have passed with bipartisan support, in most cases overwhelmingly. It turns out that underneath all the partisan grime, the America we grew up with, the nation of nations, relentlessly looking for and finding more opportunities to make our country a better place, working together to make it so, is still alive and breathing, however faint its pulse may seem to be.

The problem, given the magnitude of the challenges we face, is that 1500 bills seems like a drop in a leaky bucket. The problem-squared, as you’ll see in the weeks and months ahead, as we provide coverage of more and more of these bills, is that many have been passed in the people’s house over and over again, only for the senatorial clock to run out without their ever becoming law, in light of which it’s easy to see why administration after administration swings for the fences, even if that’s no more advisable in policymaking than it is in baseball.

The problem-cubed is that we no longer have time for the Wrestlemania of partisan politics, nor the viscous lugubriousness of the traditional bill writing and markup process. We need to literally start cutting to the chase, heads down, with no noise as the new white noise, like a serious enterprise would. We need to strike a blow for freedom and productivity in the hallowed halls by setting some boundaries that allow our representatives to focus on the business of Congress, Congress as a business, one page at a time, page after page after page.

Creative Politics is the world’s first online community-based political incubator, a work in perpetual progress, synthesizing the best of liberal and conservative ideals with technology and history to generate policies, strategies, applications, and actions for the post-modern era that are well outside the beltway, and well beyond just talk. All Creative Politics blog posts are collaborative, living documents, the way Madison and Hamilton would create them if they were writing the Federalist Papers today. Post a comment and let us prove it.

¹ When asked, after a blowout of the Wolverines in 1968, why he had chosen to go for a two point conversion late in the game rather than just kick an extra point, Hayes replied “because I couldn’t go for three.” Back

² If bill length is in any way the result of statutorily required language that must be included in every bill, a standard appendix could be developed that can be referenced, once, by a single word or sentence in every bill in which such language is required. Back

³ It could be noted that there isn’t a single page or post in CP that reads at anything less than a top 25 collegiate level. We could try to clinton our way out of this by explaining that we have no choice but to do this so as to avoid insulting your intelligence and erudition, dear reader, but instead we’ll simply pledge that when we–the Creative Politics community–are drafting binding legislation for our nation, we will hew religiously to the same standard we’re urging upon our representatives here. In the meantime, we want our adherence to principle in two other dimensions (literally) noted: this is, to date, by far the shortest Creative Politics piece ever written. Back

⁴ The who’s who of composers and conductors who learned their craft from her included Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Quincy Jones, Elliott Carter, Philip Glass, Daniel Barenboim, John Eliot Gardiner, Herb Elwell, Virgil Thomson, Astor Piazzolla, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, David Diamond, Paul Bowles (the writer–and composer), Lennox Berkeley, Easley Blackwood, Marc Blitzstein, and many more. She has been described as “the most influential teacher since Socrates” by one leading contemporary composer. Back

⁵ Seriously, the House and Senate could get together for an annual Golden Globes-style soiree–quarterly if need be–go through metal detectors, get properly liquored up, talk to each other like they used to (crowdsource the seating chart to the public), maybe discover a few things in common worth remembering (so make it a cash bar), and let them vote and applaud for all the building name changes, commemorative coins, Congressional gold medals, et al they want.  Televise the whole thing (it can’t do worse, ratings-wise, than the entertainment industry is doing today, especially with so many ‘storylines’ in the potential interactions) and stud it with best-of PSA advertising. If those honored, the beneficiaries, the recipients are living, or there are family members who can represent them, so much the better–let them speak (we’ll take the over that their stories–and protests–will be more moving than Method actors peering out from the penumbra of the characters they played and sharing what they learned from them). etc. etc. etc…. Back

⁶ The reduction of which was the raison d’etre of the entire privatization movement Back

⁷ Leading to a condition we’ve come to call IID, or Internet-induced dementia, which the techies among us claim is the result of buffer overflow, while the more biologically-oriented believe it may, like physical drowning, be caused by insufficient oxygen–though not so much a matter of deprivation, as in the physical, water-based, inevitably fatal case, just not enough to process all the information flying at us all the time. There are other theories as well, but we all agree on the cardinal symptom: your parents complain about some element of cognitive decline they’re experiencing, and you realize that not only are you experiencing it, too, but so is most everyone you know… Back

⁸ And should a group of stakeholders seek to corner and cook the books, we have more than a century’s worth of antitrust experience and expertise to ferret it out and deal with it. Back