Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez wants lawmakers to be able to include images in the text of their bills, figuring it could help illustrate or simplify some of the trickier things lawmakers are trying to do in their legislation.
She saw it as a way of dragging the format of bills — which haven’t changed much in the last 200 years — into the 21st Century.
“Have you ever thought that it’s really weird you can’t add pictures to laws?” the Washington Democrat posted to social media. “I see so many laws that would be clearer and more logical if we could just include a map or a blueprint.”
There is no bar to including images right now, and House procedures even say it has happened on “rare” occasions. One 1986 measure, for example, included an image of a warning label.
But there is no standard process for including them, so lawmakers don’t.
Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez said the time has come, calling it a way of democratizing bill-writing.
“For too long, our laws have been written for ‘staffer bros’ with bow ties who will issue guidance on how to follow them from cubicles on Pennsylvania Avenue,” she wrote in a July letter to the top Republican and Democrat in each chamber. “We should be able to draft legislation that speaks to all Americans, regardless of how they learn or the profession they work in, from visual learners and foremen to lawyers and policy experts.”
Gerlinde Berger-Walliser, a professor who studies contract visualization and legal design, said that formally including illustrations in bills would be “revolutionary.”
She said it would need rules to make them useful, not harmful.
The danger is that pictures or graphics could add uncertainty, such as what weight a judge hearing a case challenging a law with images in it would give to the image.
Ms. Berger-Walliser, though, said that wouldn’t be anything new.
“Well, my argument would be, well, words are also uncertain. Most lawsuits are about the interpretation of words,” she said. “So it really depends on how you use it.”
But she did say there would need to be some guideline for deciding which takes priority in cases when a bill’s words and images clash.
Kevin Kosar, who studies Congress for the American Enterprise Institute, said laws aren’t written in plain English, which means they aren’t always easily accessible for the layman.
He said illustrations can transmit meaning, but there might be tradeoffs.
“And if somebody drops a picture inside a bill, are they dropping a thousand words in the bill? What are those thousand words? Are we just to guess at them? What are the odds that the reasonable observer can agree upon what those thousand words are?” he said.
Ms. Berger-Walliser said other nations already allow images in their legislation. She named Australia as one.
And in the U.S., some judges include images in their rulings as a way of illustrating or expanding on their points.
That even goes for the Supreme Court.
Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion last year in Garland v Cargill, which found that “bump stock” additions to firearms don’t qualify as machine guns, used six images to illustrate the difference between the two firing mechanisms.
A 2013 study in the Chicago-Kent Law Review, which looked at the use of images in high court rulings from 1997 to 2009, concluded that they worked best when accompanied by an explanation for why they were included and what point the justices thought they were illustrating.
Even the Code of Federal Regulations, the compendium of rules issued by Executive Branch agencies that has the force of law, allows images.
Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez, in her letter to House and Senate leaders, pointed out that the House has already ordered the chamber’s clerk to study the feasibility of adding illustrations to bills.
The clerk was told to move ahead with an implementation plan if the idea was feasible.
It’s not clear where that study stands, but the congresswoman said it shows an appetite for action.
“That bipartisan directive demonstrates a recognition that the current process can be improved and provides a strong foundation for implementing a permanent, standardized approach,” she wrote in a July letter.
None of the four congressional party leaders responded to a request for comment.
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