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Legislative history

ViaInstanpundit comes this commentary on legislative history. It's in regard to the Supreme's recent Hamdan decision... apparently, there were large parts of the "Senate debate" on the legislation that were inserted afterwards.

Not that that's anything new. Congresscritters "revise and correct" their remarks afterwards. As in rewriting them to say what they figure they should have said, or inserting entire speeches that were never given. I was present when House and Senate debated the Firearm Owners' Protection Act of 1986, and (1) Kennedy's speeches were absolutely incoherent, to the point where for minutes at a time you couldn't figure out what he was arguing... needless to say, the printed record shows them well-organized. (2) on the critical question of 922(o), inserted on the House side and construed to ban post-ban machineguns, the sponsor's "who could be against machineguns?" became "who could be against my bill to ban machineguns?"

And to think there's criticism of Bill Clinton's "it depends upon what your definition of 'is' is" testimony... in Washington, that's an apt response. You can have legislative debates that never occurred, with responses that were never given, and of course policy statements that don't reflect any policy that will ever be followed.