Whenever a major bill passed the California legislature, the following year the legislature would adopt a follow-up bill to fix up the omissions and errors that invariably accompanied such legislation. Almost any large scale change in the law will have unintended consequences. The process even had a name--the follow-up bill was called a “clean-up bill.”
Last week the U.S. Senate adopted a bill on an 81 to 17 vote to repeal the section of the health care bill that required business to report any payment of more than $600 or more a year to any vendor. The purpose of this provision was noble. It would mean that the vendors would report their income to the I.R.S. Estimates were that this would generate about $20 billion in revenue. The problem was that a reporting requirement for $600 transactions put a real burden on small businesses.
So Republicans and Democrats united to make the bill less onerous. This was a “clean-up bill.” It is supposed to work this way--members of both parties recognizing a problem and fixing it.
This is in contrast to the action of the Republicans in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. They passed a law striking down the requirement that people have health insurance. This legislation, which means nothing and fixes nothing, was merely a symbolic slap at the health care legislation. Incidentally, Carbon’s representative, Doyle Heffley, was a co-sponsor.
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