Be Careful What You Ask For

Have you ever heard the quote "tall fences make good neighbors?"  Maybe you've had a nosy neighbor who was always looking over the fence commenting on how trashy your yard looks or saw you peeing on your azaleas and makes some off handed comment about how sick it is that neighbors think because they have fences that they can do whatever they want in their backyards.

Maybe, as you're dealing with nosy neighbor, you think,...there ought to be a law to keep neighbors from looking over fences.  So you call your friendly, neighborhood congress person and say, "There needs to be a law to prohibit nosy neighbors from looking over fences.

Congress person, not having anything better to do, agrees and drafts a bill to make it a felony to look over a neighbor's fence effectively amending penal code 142.22(a) which, up to that point, had never been amended over the course of the last 110 years. 

Sound like a silly law?

So, picture it, you're eating a sandwich and as you're going about, a piece of sandwich gets lodged in your windpipe and you start to turn blue.  You're nosy neighbor hears what sounds to be gacking noises but, because it's now a felony to look over a neighbor's fence, neighbor decides to go back to drinking lemonade and watering his kudzu vines and you choke to death.

Still a silly law? 

Turns out, there a lots of laws on state and federal books that either ought not to have been drafted let alone written into law but are still on the books causing mass mayhem and carnage.

Take, for example, the "Rule of Five" law recently invoked by Rep. Chuck Schumer.  See, back in 1928 (May 29, 1928, ch. 901, § 2, 45 Stat. 996), congress created this rule (called the Rule of Five) to compel executive agencies to provide information relevant to the committee's jurisdiction.  Codified under 5 USC 2954, the Information to Committees of Congress on request law states:

An Executive agency, on request of the Committee on Government Operations of the House of Representatives, or of any seven members thereof, or on request of the Committee on Governmental Affairs of the Senate, or any five members thereof, shall submit any information requested of it relating to any matter within the jurisdiction of the committee. 

On it's face, it's not all the problematic and pretty straight forward.  The problem is that it doesn't give any timetables in way of how long the person(s) on whom the request is made has to comply with any particular request.  

So, imagine you are an investigative body and are ripping through thousands of pages of something and you get a request from an agency that wants EVERYTHING on its desk in, oh,....say....a couple of weeks.  

Hells Bells, you haven't even gone through everything and everything is still a jumble and said agency/committee want's EVERYTHING!?

Such, I suspect, was the situation back in July 2025 when Chuck Schumer invoked 5 USC 2954 to compel the DOJ to release the ENTIRE Epstein file.  Still digging through stuff and the DOJ has to stop and put it all in a neat pile and deliver everything?  Really?!?

I'm guessing it's a ruse to obfuscate some other issue brewing.  You know - look at my right hand but don't look at what I've got in my left.  All smoke and mirrors and I'm betting someone is thinking why exactly do we need to keep 5 USC 2954 still on the books?  

In the very least, maybe the law should be modified to include a timetable - something in the way of give us some slack; we're doing the best we can and need time to get this stuff together in a readable manner.

I also suspect that once all the Epstein files have been gone over that there will be information that the requesting parties wished wasn't made public - which, I suspect is the purpose behind the request (ie to keep silent/bury that which certain parties don't want to be made public).

I'm just sayin.