More pictures?! One lawmakers twisted answer for fixing our laws

During the regime of Cambodian dictator and genocidaire Pol Pot, soldiers and secret policemen used eyeglasses as a quick way of determining who deserved a place in their socialist utopia.The bespectacled were often shot for that reason alone, as treacherous bourgeois parasites.Last week Rep.Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) resurrected something of that sentiment in her plan to encourage illustrations in all new bills in Congress — because text alone is just too difficult to comprehend.“For too long, our laws have been written for ‘staffer bros’ with bow ties who will issue guidance on how to follow them from cubicles on Pennsylvania Avenue,” she declared in a letter to congressional leadership.“We should be able to draft legislation that speaks to all Americans, regardless of how they learn or the profession they work in — from visual learners and foremen to lawyers and policy experts.” “Ultimately, this is about representation.”An unusual position for an elected official to take: Literacy belongs to the socially undesirable, to unfashionable “staffer bros.”(Note, too, the snobbery: Blue-collar workers, for whom “foremen” serves as a clear stand-in, ipso facto can’t read this way.)Perez is right that the byzantine tangle of both our legal code and our regulatory regime baffles and confuses even the most intelligent and skilled Americans. But published federal regulations already contain plenty of images — and this hasn’t done much for their legibility.A more elegant solution might be for law- and policy-makers simply to produce fewer, clearer laws and regulations, as legal scholars like civil-rights legend Harvey Silverglate have argued.Yet the vivid and impassioned language Perez reserves for mocking the bespectacled, bow-tied “bros” who can parse and explicate textual difficulties in our law stands out amid her letter’s otherwise tepid prose — all the more so as her remarks come amid what can only be described as a na...