Who's Running This Circus?

What struck me even more about the Gene Healy article in Reason was the following excerpt:

McCain-Feingold clocked in at a mere 36 pages, yet in February 2003 The New York Times reported that the Democratic and Republican party organizations had to hire high-priced lawyers and consultants to run seminars teaching senators and congressmen about the requirements of the law they had just passed. "I didn't realize what all was in it," Rep. Robert Matsui (D-Calif.) said.

They didn't understand the requirements of the law they had just passed. Unbelievable. And this was legislation that directly affected them and the way that they raised money.
McCain-Feingold is extraordinarily bad law. It may have been based on good intentions, but the ramifications of the law have been disastrous. First, it has made it all but impossible for anyone but the very rich to run for office. For some reason, the courts have ruled that spending your money on advertising, etc. to promote your own political ideas or to support your own political campaign is a free speech issue, protected by the 1st amendment, while spending your money on someone else's campaign is not. Therefore, under McCain-Feingold, you cannot give more than $2,000 to any single candidate in any single election. It takes a lot of $2,000 contributions to run a successful campaign these days, especially difficult if you aren't an incumbent.
The loophole that McCain-Feingold left open gave rise to the 527 organizations in the last election. These organizations can accept unlimited amounts of money, but cannot be officially tied in anyway to a candidate. Politician's must love these. 527's can put out the most outrageous and scandalous allegations, and the candidate can say that he had nothing to do with them. Plausible deniability.
So, Congress passed this law, a mere 36 pages of text, and didn't understand it. The Intelligence Reform Bill of 2004 is 200 pages longer. How many Senators actually understand that little piece of legislation? If you want some real reform in government, maybe we should adopt a five sentence rule for legislation. No law can be longer than five sentences long. Of course, maybe we should also make sure that they use single syllable words so that the whole of Congress can understand them, too.