The Case Against Congressional ‘Comprehensive Reform’ of Anything

[Geee]

PJMedia:

“Yes we can!” chanted visitors to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room when the final vote on comprehensive immigration reform of 13-5 was announced on Monday night.

Actually, we’d rather not.

Forget the particulars of the bill, which are, indeed, bad enough. It is the notion that a large dollop of American society can successfully be “reformed” by the stroke of a pen, with little consequence to this and future generations, that makes “comprehensive” legislation a symbol of bad and imprudent governance.

How bad and imprudent? The law of unintended consequences figures mightily into any comprehensive reform that seeks to predict what a particular situation will be like 5 or 10 years down the road. Anyone who doubts that need only look at Obamacare to realize that almost everything on which the administration sold comprehensive health care reform is falling apart. Also, most of the benefits promised not only will never be realized, but the bill will have created exactly the opposite of the effects intended. Costs of insurance will skyrocket, far fewer people will sign up for insurance via the exchanges than was imagined, and the legislation will have almost doubled in anticipated costs by 2020.

And yet, here we go again. “Comprehensive” immigration reform will hit the Senate floor, and the immigration system, groaning under the 800 pages already written with some promised amendments to come, could be entirely undone by the time the House and Senate are through with their “historic” reformation.