In the spirit of the NCLB testing program, I'll suggest a question for assessing the reading abilities of congressional candidates.
Read the following sentence carefully:
"Hereinafter, notwithstanding any other provision of law governing the disclosure of income tax returns or return information, upon written request of the Chairman of the House or Senate Committee on Appropriations, the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service shall allow agents designated by such Chairman access to Internal Revenue Service facilities and any tax returns or return information contained therein."
True or false: if enacted into law, this sentence would not allow any inspections of tax returns.
This is not a trivial question, apparently. Over the weekend, the quoted sentence was inserted into the big end-of-session spending bill, as the result of a request from Rep. Ernest Istook (R-OK).
Members of the Senate expressed various degrees of annoyance and embarrassment when this was noticed, and unanimously passed a resolution repudiating the provision. According to the AP, Rep. Instook has said that the provision has been misinterpreted, and is not his fault anyhow:
Istook, chairman of the House Appropriations transportation subcommittee, said in a statement Sunday that the Internal Revenue Service drafted the language, which would not have allowed any inspections of tax returns. ``Nobody's privacy was ever jeopardized,'' the statement said.
I haven't been able to find a copy of Rep. Istook's actual statement, to see if he really asserted that the quoted provision "would not have allowed any inspections of tax returns"; nor have I seen any evaluation by a spokesperson for the IRS about their role in drafting the provision, or their interpretation of its consequences.
So the possible relationships between reality and reporting are complicated here. However, after several minutes of pondering, I can't come up with a possible world, plausibly related to these reports, in which Rep. Istook is not stupid or dishonest or both. I await clarification, since I'd rather think that a congressman would be in favor of congressional access to tax returns than that a congressman can't understanding the plain meaning of a provision that he pushes into a bill, or would be willing to tell a deliberate and obvious lie about what (he thought) the provision means.
Nevertheless, I take the whole story to be good news about the health of the republic. At least some Senate staffers actually read the text of bills before they become final, and are capable of understanding what the text means; and everyone in Washington agrees (at least in public) that it's a bad idea for politicians to go snooping into people's tax returns.
Whether (some) congresscritters need remedial English remains to be seen.
[ Update: Rep. Instook's website suggests that he (or his staff) has a larger problem with linguistic detail. To start with, he has a minority view about how representative is spelled:
From the bottom of my heart, I am humbled and honored to be re-elected to represent you in the House of Represenatives. [emphasis added]
This might have been a simple typo -- the omission of a "t" -- but it might also reflect the influence of pronunciation. Most Americans, including me, flap and voice the "nt" sequence in this word, so that the pronunciation becomes something like [ˌrɛ.prɪˈzɛ.ɾ̃ə.ɾɪv], which is exactly how "represenative" would probably be pronounced, if it were a word. There may also be some submorphological resonance between represenative and senator lurking here.
Google currently finds 23,000 other pages with the spelling "represenatives", compared to 32,000,000 with the spelling "representatives". So this mistake happens, but the frequency is still less than one in a thousand.
There's certainly nothing either shameful or ignorant about the pronunciation that may underlie this spelling error -- it's the result of regular sound laws that are nearly universal in today's American English, and I speak the same way myself. To make the point that there is no regional or political prejudice here, let's note in passing that this flapping and voicing of post-stress coronal consonants is less culpable than Senator Kerry's pronunciation of paraplegic, which is arguably a mistake, though a common and natural one. And as regular readers know, I'm a sloppy typist and a bad proofreader, so I'm in no position to carp about typographical errors.
But however erratic and irrational English spelling might be, it's a matter of strict social convention rather than individual choice. And typographical errors should be caught and corrected, especially in prominent places. So for a U.S. representative to misspell the word respresentative in the first sentence of his home page is, let's say, not a sign of mindful communication.
The rest the home page message is not much better:
Thank you to all of the countless hours that were spent for me and other candidates all across Oklahoma. I am going to keep this site current and up to date and stay tuned for some new features. Thank you again for your vote and support in this last election!
I suspect that Rep. Istook meant "thank you [to my supporters] for all of the countless hours...", not "thank you to all of the countless hours". I don't think there's any variety of English in which "thank you to X" means "thank you for X".
In the next sentence, "current and up to date" is redundant and says the same thing twice. Worse, it produces a confusing sentence with adjacent conjunctions on different levels, which may be why the writer didn't notice the questionable non-parallelism of "I am going to keep this site current" and "stay tuned for some new features".
All in all, this is not the home page of someone who chooses and arranges his words carefully.
To get back to the controversial spending-bill provision, let's compare it side-by-side to Istook's statement on his home page. On balance, I'm inclined to believe that the texts in the two panels below were not written by the same person. The right-hand text is in the first person and on Istook's home page, and if it was written by a professional speechwriter, Istook was badly cheated. So I conclude that someone other than Istook wrote the left-hand text, just as he claimed.
| Hereinafter, notwithstanding any other provision of law governing the disclosure of income tax returns or return information, upon written request of the Chairman of the House or Senate Committee on Appropriations, the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service shall allow agents designated by such Chairman access to Internal Revenue Service facilities and any tax returns or return information contained therein. | From the bottom of my heart, I am humbled and honored to be re-elected to represent you in the House of Represenatives. Thank you to all of the countless hours that were spent for me and other candidates all across Oklahoma. I am going to keep this site current and up to date and stay tuned for some new features. |
Questions still open: who wrote the left-hand sentence? why? why did Istook ask for it to be inserted in the spending bill? Did Istook understand what the passage said?
Here's a wild guess: Istook wanted legislators to have better access to income tax information, in order to be able to predict the fiscal effects of changes in tax law. (He cares about this stuff because he's the author of a balanced budget amendment). He asked someone to draft a provision that would eliminate certain roadblocks that privacy considerations now impose. They did so, carelessly and without thinking about the broader consequences, and Istook had his staff push it into the spending bill without reading it, or at least without understanding it.
]
[Update #2: Philip Brooks points out that the mysterious author(s) of the provision probably meant hereafter rather than hereinafter. He also provides a "plain English" translation:
From now on, no matter what the rest of the law says, the Chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees and their staff can get permission to go into IRS offices and look at anyone's tax returns.
I'd add "or any other return-related information".
Meanwhile, Senator Stevens showed reporters a hand-written form of the proposal, allegedly from an IRS employee, in an attempt to demonstrate "neither he nor any other Republican had crafted the potentially privacy-invading language".
Despite this handwritten evidence, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday 11/24 that "doubts remained yesterday over exactly how the controversial tax-return provision -- which allows Appropriations Committee chairmen or their "agents" access to Internal Revenue Service facilities or "any tax returns or return information contained therein" -- got into the omnibus spending bill late last week. House Republicans blamed committee staff aides and the IRS". As Joshua Marshall pointed out, it's hardly credible that after four days, the causal chain involved is still so unclear that the paper can only write about unidentified staffers for unidentified representatives or senators dealing with unidentified IRS employees. This is the best investigative reporting that the Washington press corps can come up with? ]
Posted by Mark Liberman at November 22, 2004 10:43 AM