It occurred to me last night that not only do the rewritten GOP summaries that
Representative Slaughter brought to our attention misstate the
intent of the amendments, they misstate the
actual meaning of them. This is factual distortion and is grounds to have them revisited, IMHO. An explanation follows:
Say write an activity book, and one of the exercises has a bunch of shapes of different colors, as below.
You write an instruction: "Check off things that are red."
The answer page has an image that looks like this:
When the book is published, you're stunned to hear that none of the kindergarten kids can get this simple exercise right. Instead, they keep submitting this answer:
Why? Because some overzealous editor has changed the question to:
"Check off circles if they are red."
In other words, the amendments proposed wanted to exempt all red things. Are some of them circles? Maybe. But to rewrite the summary saying that the amendment proposed exempting red circles changes their meaning in a substantive way.
Certainly there must be some provision for revising the summaries. Isn't this enough grounds to do so?
(Cross-posting to my blog at Last Midnight.)