The House of Representatives just voted 220 to 215, adopting a 2000 page Bill, to commit a beginning outlay of 1 trillion dollars of our children’s future earnings to pay for a dubious health care scheme. You, beginning now, and your posterity will be paying for this bill in perpetuity regardless of whether or not you or they want its jurisdiction. You or they will be subject to imprisonment or a large fine, or both, for failure to comply with its mandates. How do I know? The word shall. The words shall contrasted with the word may are what the lawyers call “terms of art.” We lay people take little notice of words like shall or may, but in the law, what you “shall” do is a mandatory command, whereas what you “may” do is a discretionary command. Shall means must and may means maybe.
I learned this truism, before then unknown to me, long ago as a Legislator, but many of you would not know of this. Another thing that I learned in the Legislature was that every indentation, space, hyphen, period, colon, semi-colon or comma has meaning, sometimes of great consequence, in the written Law.
I submit to you that a Bill of 2000 pages that contains nearly 3500 “shalls” is something to feared beyond description. I submit that not one person in a million, certainly no one in Congress, has read this bill let alone understood it. That it was drafted by scores of people that could not have, because of its size, coordinated their efforts and that no one, no one, understands its text or what is trying to be done. The prospect for unintended consequences is massive. I further submit that in the realization of its wording by the fiat interpretation of some faceless bureaucrat or committee will be where the whitening bones of your freedom and that of your posterity will lie forever.