I’m tired of hearing people complain that the House’s health care bill is 1,990 pages.

First, here is the health care bill. The pages have wide margins and are double spaced, and most lines are indented at least once.

Second, it’s not like this is the PATRIOT Act, where members of Congress were given hardly any time to read it or debate it before voting on it.* Congress has been working on health care for months. Any member of Congress who wants to read the bill has the opportunity to do so. And anyone who doesn’t has staffers to read bills and summarize them — which is not ideal, of course, but it’s better than not having time to read it at all.

(* The same people who criticize the health care bill do not seem to have criticized the PATRIOT Act, except for libertarians.)

Third, although Joe Q. Public also has the opportunity to read the bill online, there is no constitutional requirement that members of Congress give us time to do so. “Good old-fashioned Americans” are always talking about going back to the principles on which this country was founded. Well, this country was founded on the principle that you elect people to represent your interests in Congress, and then you shut the hell up and let them do their work. You are not a lawyer and you have no idea how to read legislation. If you don’t like what your elected representatives do, you vote them out at the next election.

Okay, I’m being snarky. Of course we’ve always been a rambunctious country, and citizens have always had the right to protest against their government. But my point is that the founders didn’t create a direct democracy, they created a representative democracy. There was no Internet 220 years ago, no telegraph, and no expectation that the average citizen would read legislation. If you’re going to complain about getting back to the ideas on which this country was founded, at least know what you’re talking about.

If you want to complain about the health care bill, fine, but base it on something substantive, not on OOH IT’S TOO MANY PAGEZ!