It seems that every day we learn of some new horror in the financial reform bill currently before Congress. This is not surprising given that the Senate version of the bill, for example, is 1,566 pages long. Those who voted on it probably have no clue as to most of its contents, as was the case with such monstrosities as ObamaCare and the Patriot Act.

“Millions of Americans arrested for but not convicted of crimes will likely have their DNA forcibly extracted and added to a national database, according to a bill approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday,” reports CNET.

On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments in the states’ lawsuit against ObamaCare. If the court, as it should, strikes down the entire law, friends of the Constitution will have reason to celebrate.

“If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan,” President Barack Obama said repeatedly during the debate over his healthcare reform bill, hoping to allay fears that the bill, if passed, would force individuals into different health insurance plans or force those plans to change.

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has lately been arguing strenuously against the Obama administration’s decision to force all employers, regardless of their religious convictions, to provide insurance coverage for contraception, including contraceptives that can cause abortions. The government's decision has been widely denounced by officials of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches because they are opposed to both birth control (except in certain limited circumstances) and abortion.

Former U.S. Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper of Erie, Pennsylvania, was one of six pro-life Democrats in Congress who caved in to pressure from President Barack Obama to vote for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) against their best judgment.

From 1993 until midway through 2011, Newt Gingrich repeatedly and quite forcefully argued that the federal government ought to impose an ObamaCare-like individual mandate on Americans, requiring them to have health insurance or otherwise to demonstrate that they can pay their future healthcare bills. (Regular readers of The New American are well aware of this because this publication has covered the story extensively.) However, a recently unearthed recording of a 2009 conference call featuring the former Speaker of the House is getting quite a bit of attention in the blogosphere because it suggests to some that Gingrich explicitly endorsed the healthcare legislation then beginning its trek through the legislative process.

“Everything we know about [Mitt] Romney’s record tells us to not trust anything he says while he’s campaigning for office, because his positions will change when he’s trying to appeal to a different electorate,” observed Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner. Klein is correct, of course. In just a few short years Romney has, for instance, gone from being pro-choice to being pro-life and from describing himself as a “progressive” to saying he’s a “conservative Republican.”

Responding to criticism of his “nay” vote on a supplemental appropriations bill for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Sen. John Kerry said in 2004, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it” — a statement that came to define the Massachusetts Democrat, then running for President, as a flip-flopper with no convictions.

It seems the only way to find out what a politician really thinks is to wait until he leaves office. No longer concerned with obtaining either votes or campaign contributions, he is then free to reveal his true beliefs — and often does.