Jack Hochanadel 

During late February of this year, New Jersey lawmakers wrote a bill to lessen the impact of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and expand people’s rights to take ICE officials to court over “unconstitutional conduct.” What caught people’s eye about it wasn’t the effect of the bill itself, but rather the name. The bill, named the “Fight Unlawful Conduct and Keep Individuals and Communities Empowered Act,” reveals the very strong feelings of the New Jersey lawmakers towards ICE when acronymizing the name.  

It definitely got a chuckle out of me and my friends as well as countless people on Twitter, but it ended up causing a bit of controversy among Republican lawmakers, though any concerns they had were dismissed as “unserious”, with assemblywoman Kate Brennan stating that, “While my colleagues and I are working to protect New Jersey residents from masked ICE agents, Assemblyman Bergen is busy filing complaints about a bill name. Please be serious.” 

While I agree with the contents of the bill itself and am glad that action is being taken against what, for the most part, has been unrestricted and unlawful deportation and killing of citizens and non-citizens alike, I found myself surprisingly agreeing with what Assemblyman Brian Bergen said about the name of the bill itself. The bill’s name barely gives an indication of what it actually does, and it feels very provocative. Despite that, I think going so far as to file a complaint because you were, in fact, provoked by the bill’s name only proves the point that the original lawmakers were attempting to make. 

I remember the night after learning about that bill and the conversation I had with some friends about it, and I kept going back to a single question repeatedly: What do I want from the politicians I vote into power? I don’t live in New Jersey, but if a bill under the exact same name passed here in North Carolina, I’d think that the people I voted for weren’t taking their job seriously. It doesn’t sound like a bill that went through elected officials; it sounds like a title that someone in middle school would name their project to get a laugh out of their friends and think that their teacher wouldn’t notice. 

It’s not like this is the first time lawmakers have tried to be funny with bill names, either. In 2018, the Standardized Testing and Accountability Before Large Elections Giving Electors Necessary Information for Unobstructed Selection Act (the STABLE GENIUS Act) was named to poke fun at President Trump’s claim that he was a “very stable genius” when people were questioning his mental stability that January. Other bills with this kind of “quirky” naming include the Zeroing Out Money for Buying Influence after Elections Act (the ZOMBIE act) poking fun at the idea of “zombie accounts” – accounts with large amounts of leftover campaign money owned by losing politicians, and the Concerns Over Nations Funding University Campus Institutes in the United States Act (the CONFUCIUS act) attempted to reduce Confucius Institutes in the United States that are sponsored by the Chinese government.  

None of these bills made it far through Congress, with some not getting any votes at all. 

There have actually been attempts to stop this kind of naming scheme in the past—back in 2015, former Representative Mike Honda introduced a bill that would prevent adding unnecessary words to the name of a bill just to create an acronym out of it. A former educator himself, Honda took offense to the English language, “being so brutally abused” and made a similar point to Assemblyman Bergen’s point on the New Jersey ICE bill—the titles often don’t give an indication of what the bill actually does, and it feels like lawmakers are simply doing it for a laugh instead of having any intention to pass the bill. Remember—all the example bills above died early in Congress, and even though the New Jersey bill is only for the state, it’s very possible that it will follow the same fate. 

By the way, the name of that attempted bill to prevent acronyms like that? The Accountability and Congressional Responsibility On Naming Your Motions Act, otherwise known as the ACRONYM act. Guess Honda managed to prove his own point by the bill failing in the House, and bills with “clever” titles continue to this day. 

Look, I get it. It’s important that bills are memorable to the people voting for them, and a bill with a name that makes people laugh is going to be remembered more than a bill that does more but has a generic name. But how many CARE Acts, HELP Acts, SAFE Acts, or FAIR Acts do we have to endure before everything blends together? It’s not as if these bills actually pass with any level of frequency, either.  

Of course, only about 6% of bills actually pass Congress anyway, but my point is that being “quirky” with your bill titles doesn’t help, and despite the few laughs it may get when you hear a silly word being mentioned by serious faces in Congress—those laughs don’t matter when you’re trying to get re-elected. I don’t go into my local voting place thinking “Oh, this person introduced the HELLO GUYS Act, I should vote for them because I laughed a whole lot at that!” If anything, I’m more reluctant to vote for them because I shouldn’t be laughing at the people I vote for to represent me. This isn’t a school where you can afford to add a silly background to your Google Slides presentation or write all the text in Comic Sans; we’re dealing with actual legislation that seriously affects people’s lives.