The House yesterday passed the cap-and-tax bill -- a bit of insanity that should get most Democrats representing Middle America run out on a rail in 2010. What's most troubling about yesterday's move was that the cap-and-trade bill didn't really exist as such when it was "passed" yesterday. Instead of a bill, the House passed a 1,100-page bill with an attached 300 pages of editing instructions.

Texas Republican Reps. Joe Barton and Louie Gohmert have just asked the chair whether there exists a complete, updated copy of the Waxman-Markey carbon-cap bill.

"If a bill for which there is no copy were to actually pass this body," Barton asked, "could the bill without a copy be sent to the Senate for its consideration?"

Through a series of parliamentary inquiries, the Republicans learned that the 300-plus page managers' amendment, added to the bill last night in the House Rules Committee, has not even been been integrated with the official copy of the 1,090-page bill at the House Clerk's desk, let alone in any other location. The two documents are side-by-side at the desk as the clerk reads through the instructions in the 300 page document for altering the 1,090 page document.

But they cannot be simply combined, because the amendment contains 300 pages of items like this: "Page 15, beginning line 8, strike paragraph (11)..." How many members of Congress do you suppose have gone through it all to see how it changes the bill?

The answer, of course, is zero. This is at least the second time since the American voters so foolishly handed over the entire government to the Democrats that they have passed a bill that no one has read -- the first was the abomination of a "stimulus" plan that was passed less than 24 hours after the language was finalized.

Speaking of openness, transparency and knowing what the h-e-double-hockeysticks you're signing into law, President Barack Obama has officially reneged on his "sunlight before signing" promise.