>>Or so I hear - my wife still has the patience to listen to some news in the morning (NPR), sometimes even gets as far as 15 minutes into the BBC news before she's just had enough.
>
>That would be the Cap and Trade bill....a few folks have complained about that - not just the bill, but the way in which congress tried to sweep it through without even reading the thing.
>
>There is now a site tracking bills that are rushed through without any possibility of those voting on it to have read it prior:
>http://readthebill.org/rushed/

The mechanism established in 1913 with founding the Federal Reserves (three guys voting a crucial thing on Christmas) and then with the Patriot Act (the version voted on was very different from one distributed, and all of it was a jumble of patches to existing laws, referenced by number, voted in on another last evening before a long weekend) is by now well oiled and runs smoothly.

All big empires seem to be built on stuff which was still legal at the time.