Jim DeMint's new hero: Jimmy Carter

Senator Jim DeMint's resorting to one of his old tricks: claiming nobody in Congress reads the bills the pass and calling for people to sign petitions demanding that they do so. Here's his blather in July about the stimulus bill, which, just incidentally, is adding $25 a week to South Carolina unemployment compensation checks:

VAN SUSTEREN: Well, who's doing this reading? Is it lobbyists and staff members? Are those the one ones who are doing the reading? Because I have yet to find a House member or a Senate who says, Yes, I've read these three versions start to finish. Who's -- who's doing this reading?

DEMINT: Well, you can look at the language and see the plaintiffs' attorneys have written a lot of it because there's no tort reform in it and there's actually more liability.

So now he's got up one on the health care bill.

What's striking is, in all  his interviews, DeMint never tells whether he has read any of these bills he claims no one else has read.

DeMint's purse-lipped moralizing calls to mind another outstanding example of bill-reading:

During his four years in the State Senate, Carter vowed to read EVERY page of EVERY bill he voted on. He wanted to show that he was not a machine politician who could be swayed by his boss’ suggestions, as his father was by the Talmadge machine. Carter apparently did keep to this promise.  It likely required him to pull some all-nighters at the end of each legislative session. Carter was trying to emulate John Kennedy, not realizing that Kennedy would never have worked that hard.