by Rod Hughes

Excuse us for interrupting your reading pleasure, but is there an editor in the house?

A congressional committee made up of 11 legislators is due to perform some serious surgery on one of the bills needed to implement the Central American Free Trade Treaty with the United States (CAFTA). The bill was sent back to committee this week because the text was just too convoluted and abstruse for application. In short, wordy and vague.

The bill would open up the insurance market currently held captive by the National Insurance Institute (INS) and redefine INS, but whoever drafted the bill went wild and whole articles are due to be chopped by the Nov. 23 deadline. It is unlikely that the members will call in a newspaper editor–but they should.

But the task is not simple. For example, what will happen to the nation’s fire departments currently run by INS? Since fire insurance is the most common homeowner’s policy, the firemen came under INS when the insurance monopoly was organized.

National Liberation Party congresswoman Maureen Ballestero who heads the committee hopes to piece together from three alternate texts something that will please all parties including the Citizen Action Party faithfuls who opposed the treaty in the first place and voted against the first two bills in the group that would implement CAFTA. Ballestero was not exactly enchanted with the original bill and wrote one of the proposed alternative texts herself.

Much time could be saved if more bills were subjected to this blue pencil treatment. A case in point was the tax reform bill that the last legislative session patched together in an arduous four years only to have it pronounced unconstitutional by the Fourth Chamber of the Supreme Court. In fact many laws currently on the books could use editing so the constitutional chamber of the court does not have to rule on what they really mean…