During his address for the Iowa Family Leader, Cain spent much of his time denouncing President Obama’s “failure of leadership,” and said the tipping point in his decision to run for president came when Obama signed legislation overhauling and reforming the health care system. Like fellow presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Cain seemed especially concerned with the length of the bill. After claiming that the administration had not read the bill, Cain promised the audience that as President, he would never sign pieces of legislation that are longer than three pages.
CAIN: Engage the people. Don’t try to pass a 2,700 page bill — and even they didn’t read it! You and I didn’t have time to read it. We’re too busy trying to live — send our kids to school. That’s why I am only going to allow small bills — three pages. You’ll have time to read that one over the dinner table. What does Herman Cain, President Cain talking about in this particular bill?
::facepalm:: While the audience (of undoubtedly tea party enthusiasts) was receptive to this dumbed down notion, let's just review some of the bills that would have been rejected by Cain for simply having too many words:
Under this bright-line rule, Cain wouldn’t have signed such landmark pieces of legislation as the Civil Rights Act, the Social Security Act, or the PATRIOT Act. In fact, he wouldn’t have even been able to sign the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which ran 114 and 18 pages, respectively.
Let's not forget the GI Bill, the establishment of the National Park Service and pretty much every single Authorization for Appropriations. By the way, Politico actually bothered to look and found that Republicans are equally as responsible for long bills as Democrats. Nevertheless, all of them would have been tossed out of Herman Cain's Oval Office for requiring the leader of the free world the inconvenience of reading longer than it takes him to use the toilet.
