Great piece by Matt Taibbi. This gets to the essence of how potentially effective legislation gets watered down (or lawyered down). As Taibbi says, "the public perception that nothing ever gets done in Washington is driven by this very dynamic."
From the site:
This is why laws like Dodd-Frank end up being unwieldy monstrosities of thousands and thousands of pages: On the road to trying to kill a law outright, lobbyists usually try to weigh it down first by adding exceptions and verbiage. Ironically, this ends up driving the industry's own compliance costs higher in the meantime, but it's worth it, as it stalls the process.
Another irony here is that the public perception that nothing ever gets done in Washington is driven by this very dynamic. The public becomes impatient for action when every tiny provision of every bill gets bogged down as fat-cat lawyers fight for years on end over the definition of words like "compilation" and "project."
This is the ultimate in overpaid busywork for the overeducated. The ongoing bureaucratization of the legislative process is really just a high-priced welfare program for corporate lawyers.
And while lawyers make fortunes pushing commas around and adding mountains of words to already overwritten laws, ex-middle-class workers in places outside of the Beltway keep findin
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