Politicians and advocacy groups are taking advantage of April Fools’ Day to show off their comedy skills — and get attention.
Here are some of the fake announcements and bills that have been emailed today. You can decide whether they make you laugh or groan.
1. Wordy legislation names
Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) “introduced” a bill Wednesday targeting verbose legislation names. His fake bill was dubbed the Accountability and Congressional Responsibility On Naming Your Motions (ACRONYM) Act.
{mosads}”It’s gotten ridiculous. We’re getting bills that have over 10 words in the title just so they can spell something that’s supposed to be clever,” Honda said in a statement.
“The last straw was The Pension And Social Security Measuring Equivalence Permanent Linking of Everyone’s Actual Savings Environment (PASS ME PLEASE) Act, which only corrected a typo on Page 346 of the tax code,” Honda said.
2. Congress is a small business?
Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), chairman of the Small Business Committee, took a more serious tone in joking about whether Congress could be nominated as “Small Business of the Week” given its taxpayer-funded employer contributions.
“I wish it were an April Fools’ joke that Congress designated itself to be a small business in order to get the Washington exemption from Obamacare. Unfortunately it’s not, and to start, we need to know how and why Congress was allowed to be designated a small business,” Vitter said in a statement.
3. Goodbye, Comic Sans
Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, son of likely presidential candidate and former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.), announced an agencywide ban on using the typeface Comic Sans in documents and correspondence.
“While this unrefined font is appropriate for early childhood instruction in our Texas schools, the use of Comic Sans is not befitting when conducting business on key matters concerning the state of Texas,” the younger Bush said.
4. Walker’s ‘big’ tease
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a likely 2016 Republican presidential candidate, teased a “big announcement” on Twitter, encouraging people to sign up on his website to receive the alert.
His announcement that he’d be repping his home state NCAA men’s basketball team this weekend for March Madness prompted the Democratic National Committee to say that “the biggest April Fool’s Joke of all is that he thinks he should be President.”
5. Republicans praise Obama, Clintons
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) pre-emptively marked April Fools’ Day with a tweet shortly before midnight Tuesday, declaring, “After a lot of thought i have changed my mind. President Obama has a strong, solid, thoughtful foreign policy we should all support.” Gingrich tweeted it again Wednesday with “#AprilFools.”
The Republican National Committee got in on the fake praise, with Chairman Reince Priebus in a statement lauding the Clinton Foundation for “adhering to the letter and spirit of their ethics agreement with the Obama Administration” over the acceptance of foreign donations, which has been scrutinized recently.
6. Climate change ‘hoax’
Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action organization released a three-minute video exposing climate change as “a big hoax,” prompting the progressive Americans United for Change to issue a “glacier-sized apology to climate science denying Republicans.”
Apparently many ignored the advice from former Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.):
— Ben Kamisar contributed