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Screenshot/Sen. Mike Lee YouTube
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Thursday that he will allow everyone to see the long-awaited text of a bill funding the war in Ukraine and also U.S. border security this weekend.
Then when senators can come back next week he wants the first procedural vote next Wednesday.
Schumer said senators can think about it until Friday so they can get a vote before Presidents Day weekend.
Sen. Mike Lee did not hesitate in his response: "unacceptable."
“They’ve had months to write it — in complete secrecy, no less,” Lee wrote on X. “A few days won’t be nearly enough to read, debate, and amend this thing.”
As The Hill notes, "Lee has proposed giving senators at least three weeks to study the legislation, arguing that immigration law is extremely complex and that it took the Judiciary Committee a month to mark up comprehensive immigration legislation in 2013."
Three weeks is a lot better than two or three days.
Sen. Lee dissects in detail what's so drastically wrong with the current process.
It's long but so on point.
Lee's "The Firm" is what he calls the "Law Firm of Schumer & McConnell (“The Firm”), which is perpetually trying to normalize a corrupt approach to legislating—in which The Firm..."
Lee listed the many problems:
(1) spends months drafting legislation in complete secrecy,
(2) aggressively markets that legislation based not on its details and practical implications (good and bad), but only on its broadest, least-controversial objectives,
(3) lets members see bill text for the first time only a few days (sometimes a few hours) before an arbitrary deadline imposed by The Firm itself, always with a contrived sense of urgency, and then
(4) forces a vote on the legislation on or before that deadline, denying senators any real opportunity to read, digest, and debate the measure on its merits, much less introduce, consider, and vote on amendments to fix any perceived problems with the bill or otherwise improve it.
"Whenever The Firm engages in this practice, it largely excludes nearly every senator from the constitutionally prescribed process in which all senators are supposed to participate," Lee said.
He continued, "By so doing, The Firm effectively disenfranchises hundreds of millions of Americans—at least for purposes relevant to the legislation at hand—and that’s tragic."
"It’s also unAmerican, uncivil, uncollegial, and really uncool," he insists.
Yes it is.
"So why does The Firm do it?" Lee asked.
Good question and we're right there with you.
Enough of this.