There has been much made of the fact that Congress voted yesterday on a bill of greater than 1,000 pages without reading it. One historian, however, notes that the same was true of the Declaration of Independence.

Author and "historian" Dave Barry notes in Dave Barry Slept Here, which may one day become a history textbook, that Thomas Jefferson didn't expect people to actually read all that he wrote. To prove his point, Barry cites the text of the Declaration:

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind require that they should get some sleep. Because I have been up for two nights now, declaring independence, and I may be a lanky Virginian but I am not a machine, for heaven's sake, and it just doesn't make sense to sit here scrawling away these compound-complex sentences when I just know nobody's going to read them, because nobody ever does read all the way through these legal documents. Take leases. You take the average tenants, and you could put a lease in front of them with a clause about halfway t! hrough stating that they have to eat toasted moose doots for breakfast, and I guarantee you they'll never read it. Not that it would make any difference if they did, because tenants ignore most of the rules anyway, such as the rules about not flushing inappropriate objects down the toilet. Ask any landlord what he spends most of his time doing, and the odds are he'll answer "Pulling inappropriate objects out of tenant's toilets." I know one landlord who found a gerbil in there. Who the hell would do a thing like that? A cat, yes. I could see that. I could see giving a modest rebate for that. But not a gerbil. I gotta lie down.

As Congress heads into its 4th of July recess, we would do well to remember these words.