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Comment by JackFr | Hacker News Reader

She needs to be more realistic on the constraints of the system within which she is working. Omnibus spending bills are huge. The COVID relief portion of the bill is huge. So the document, which contains the implementation details is gonna be pretty big. There’s now way around it

More importantly though, you can’t reasonably budget more than a trillion dollars without some horse trading. AOC’s real problem is that she doesn’t trust her party leadership, and they don’t trust her. If she trusted her leadership there’s no need to complain before making her yes vote.

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> More importantly though, you can’t reasonably budget more than a trillion dollars without some horse trading.

Why? If the relief is federal, which I understand to be the case, no state or local level relief, then why must there be horse trading? Do the international relief in another bill. Do the illegal streaming is a felony in another bill. Etc.

It's like creating a massive program around a god function with globals instead of setting up sane module boundaries based on data structures and their relationships. You're gonna have a bad time.

> If the relief is federal, which I understand to be the case, no state or local level relief, then why must there be horse trading?

Choosing what industries, etc get relief is very political.

No, representatives should be able to read the bill in full to determine if who they in particular represent would be for or against such a law. They don’t represent their higher ups, they represent their locality. Anything else is a failure in US democracy.

The complaint isn’t against a 5000 page law, it’s a 5000 page law with 2 hours to determine the vote. Regardless of party lines, whenever this happens we should rightfully hear complaints.

No, the reason this is done is so that details of the law can be hidden in plain sight, to force people to vote 'yes' on the bill (for the things in the bill that will cause them political problems if they vote 'no'). Many lawyers excel at burying the world in a sea of words that are legally binding, in hopes that others either won't read them or can't read all of them due to time constraints.

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