What? How would they know what their voting for?

That's a quote from a Nancy Pelosi speech about Affordable Care Act.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pelosi-healthcare-pass-the...

For the record, Snopes does a good job explaining how Pelosi's statement was taken out of context by the right, especially when compared to Republican actions that were much more questionable regarding a somewhat (?) comparable Republican-sponsored bill called the American Health Care Act.

That article (and it's rating of "Mixed") has puzzled me.

The context "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy." doesn't really change the way I think about her remarks.

Controversy or not, it's a ridiculous assertion.

It would be ridiculous if she hadn't spent the two previous paragraphs which are quoted on the same Snopes page outlining what she claimed was the content of the bill.

Those paragraphs eliminate the possible interpretation of her sentence as you can only find out what's in the bill if we pass it. They also eliminate you can only be certain what's in the bill if we pass it-- she was clearly claiming the bill as an obvious positive step in health care.

It even eliminates we have to pass quickly to overcome the Republicans' criticisms-- because obviously the Republicans would (and did!) continue vociferously critiquing it after it passed.

The only meaning left I can see is the obvious interpretation-- we have to pass this so that you can benefit from the things I just said, and those benefits won't be subject to controversy. That's like bog standard political rhetoric-- what every politician claims for legislation aimed at the general public.

It's certainly an awkward sentence, but it's not difficult to figure out what she meant.

Asserting that

"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it."

is equivalent to

"the bill as an obvious positive step in health care."

requires blackout-inducing inertial velocity.

> It's certainly an awkward sentence

Why not call a spade a spade and say she misspoke?

This is a really good point and I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Think of it this way, who the heck approves of an Incident Response Policy or an Information Security Policy without reading it? Oh wait, your downvoters would approve an Incident Response Policy without reading it, /facepalm.

She was talking to citizens, not to congressmen.

Why does that matter?

Because in context, “We [legislators] have to pass the bill so that you [citizens] can find out what is in it” does not at all imply that congressmen don’t need to read the bill.

Snopes is actually quite partisan. This is a good example.

Irrelevant. Most of the fact check checkers rate it as pretty accurate:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/fact_check_review/

I'm not sure how it is irrelevant. The Pelosi statement "fact check" is pretty bad. They misleadingly state the ACA was passed by the House in October 2009. They neglect to mention the bill the House passed in October 2009 was titled “Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009”. They continue on to falsely claim Republicans of hiding the text of the American Health Care Act bill. Their claim was the draft was not posted until June 2017. A person can easily confirm the first draft of the bill was posted in March 2017 by a quick check on archive.org. They used this false claim to "illustrate" the Republicans are the shady party. They entirely ignore the Democrats took the House bill which had nothing to do with healthcare, replaced the entire text of the bill with an unrelated topic, and did everything they could to pass it because they knew they would no longer have the votes necessary if they waited on the House to pass it first. It is clear they were going out of their way to defend Democrats and demonize Republicans.

I cannot expect any site publishing such garbage be much better with the rest of their content. I certainly cannot expect any site rating such a site as "pretty accurate" any where near unbiased.

It really is sad to see these sites to sink as low as they have. They used to be decent.

It is relevant since they could be cherry picking facts to rate

Who says so-called "fact checkers" aren't partisan?

If you find reality to be partisan and people who are experts to be partisan, you’re the partisan.

It's a reference to something Nancy Pelosi said when passing Obamacare.

"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it”.

Often, that's literally true due to the length and complexity of the legislation.

Which is why there is the proposed Read the Bills Act. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read_the_Bills_Act

Well, it's not like it's uncommon for Congress to drop a 1000+ page omnibus crap sandwich the night before the vote.

That's how Pelosi runs things. That's a faithful paraphrase of what she said before the ACA (Obamacare) votes. Neither the rank-and-file of either party not the Republican leadership got to see the ACA final bill contents before the vote.

It is a deeply misleading excerpt of something Pelosi said, not "faithful" in any way. And the claim that nobody got to read the ACA before the vote is simply not true. You can see the main bill being repeatedly debated and amended on the floor of the Senate from early October 2010 until late December here:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/house-bill/3590...

The House passed the Senate bill several months later. It was then amended by the 2010 reconciliation act, which resolved some issues the House had with the Senate bill. That passed much more quickly (because it was a smaller and less controversial bill), but it still was presented on the floor of the House a week before it eventually passed:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/house-bill/4872...

  You can see the main bill

But not the final bill, which is the only one that matters. Compare the early October version with the Chaptered (final) version.