By now most of us are use to the fact that congress doesn’t read most of the bills they pass, and how could they?  They pass so many laws, that if they were to stop and read them they’d get nothing done.  They generally get some staff member to glance through the bill, make sure they won’t get attacked the next time for elections.  Well this has been surpassed by and even scarier trend that is even less known…the ability to put stuff into a bill, after it has been passed.  Yes you read that right; congress now has the amazing ability to place “placeholder” text into a bill.  When that bill gets passed with the “placeholder” in there, congress can then add text in that placeholder spot, once they have everything figured out.
    Right now there isn’t much misuse of this special “placeholder” ability that congress has apparently just granted themselves, they generally just use to for pointless nonsense.  Yet, I can only imagine some time where a congress person (I’m sure trying to be helpful) will put a placeholder in a bill and then, force a law down our throats.  Now I’m not sure how many congress people are aware of this new special ability, but I do know that one of them is…Representative Waxman of the 30th district of California, because this placeholder appears in his bill.

Below is an excerpt of HR 2454 (entire bill can be found here).  In the table of contents you can find this little gem:

Placholder in HR 2454

Now I thought that was weird, but when you actually go to the section mentioned, you can see that it indeed is part of the bill:

Well there you have it; obviously it still is in the bill.  Though like me, you must think that I am making this us…but the link to government web page can show you I’m not making this stuff up (link).  Well like me, you think, hey this bill didn’t pass yet and is still a work in progress; no one would sign a bill where anything can be inserted?  Well you’d be wrong, according to govtrack.us; the bill has passed the House of Represent ivies on June 26th, 2009 with a roll call vote of 219 for and 212 against.  “The American Clean Energy and Security Act” passed one of the steps needed to become a law…and it isn’t even completed yet.
    To find out who voted for an incomplete bill…or really a bill where they can insert whatever they want if it passes, you can visit this site: opencongress.org to see the roll call vote on this.  Though this generally falls along party lines, this is a scary prospect and shouldn’t happen in future bills.  I wouldn’t go above to call for all these politicians to resign for letting such a threat to liberty get through their ranks.  To me, this seems a treasonous act, to leave something so open that anyone can add anything to a passed bill.  Not sure how long this was going on, or how many bills have this placeholder in it, but it’s scary.  It’s only a matter of time, until this is used against the American people as a weapon against our freedoms.