Parliament Passes Bill Requiring All Bills to Be Shorter
The legislation ran 1,200 pages and has officially been referred back to itself for further review.
UPPER BUMBLETON. Lawmakers in the Grand Legislative Assembly voted Tuesday to force all future parliamentary acts onto a single sheet of paper. The Comprehensive Conciseness and Legislative Brevity Mandate passed with overwhelming support. And then a diesel forklift backed into the chamber to deliver the printed rules to the speaker.
The proposal was originally designed to stop politicians from hiding controversial policies inside massive documents. A shorter law is simply easier for the public to read. But the drafting committee spent six weeks arguing over the legal definition of the word brief. So they compromised. The text expanded outward to cover every possible interpretation of the concept.
The final document leaves nothing to chance. “We had to be certain there were no loopholes left open for verbose lawmakers,” said Arthur Pendelton, the Chief Minister of Brevity and Formatting. Section four alone spends seven hundred pages defining the legal boundaries of a short paragraph. Pendelton noted the inclusion of comprehensive reference tables for font sizes and margin widths. “It is a triumph of exhaustive minimalism.”
“We had to be absolutely certain there were no loopholes left open for verbose lawmakers.”
The physical weight of the rules caused immediate logistical problems. Engineers had to shore up the floorboards under the central reading desk with steel struts just to hold the vote. Down in the parliamentary archive room, three junior clerks are currently trapped. A stack of the appendixes tipped over around noon and blocked the main exit. Rescue teams are sliding egg salad sandwiches through a heating vent while they figure out how to safely dismantle the paper mountain.
Legal experts spotted a distinct logical flaw by Tuesday afternoon. The brevity bill became legally binding the second it passed. That meant it instantly violated its own strict one-page limit. The parliamentary oversight committee was forced to refer the legislation back to the legislation itself for trimming.
The actual review process remains unclear. “It is a bureaucratic snake eating its own tail,” said Eleanor Higgins, Director of Redundancy Eradication. The text states any document exceeding one page must be declared null and void by the authority established within that same document. “We are trying to figure out if the law can arrest itself, or if we just put it in a large recycling bin.”
Parliament established a new secondary enforcement agency to ensure compliance. Staff there will measure every submitted proposal with a standard 30-centimeter wooden ruler. Any politician found guilty of deploying excessively complex sentence structures will have to stand in the corner of the assembly hall. Their punishment is reading the entire dictionary out loud to the room.
The original drafting committee is already back at work. They plan to write a supplementary clarification bill to officially exempt the first bill from its own rules. Early estimates indicate this new document will take roughly three thousand pages to fully explain the parameters of the exemption.