Patriotic Americans Repeating Rehearsed Official Talking-points Act

Section 1. Short Title and Acknowledgment of a Familiar Problem

This Act may be cited as the “Patriotic Americans Repeating Rehearsed Official Talking-points Act” or, for those who have heard this somewhere before, the “PARROT Act of 2026.”

Congress finds and declares the following:

(a) In the span of forty-eight hours, no fewer than eighty organizations issued statements describing the same piece of voter registration legislation as “common sense,” using language so identical that a plagiarism detector flagged it at 97% similarity.

(b) The phrase “only citizens should vote” has been posted approximately four hundred thousand times in support of a bill addressing a phenomenon that occurs at a documented rate of 0.0001% of all votes cast, which is roughly the statistical equivalent of legislating against shark attacks in Nebraska.

(c) A single social media post endorsing said legislation received 56.8 million views, written by the owner of the platform on which it was posted, which Congress acknowledges is the digital equivalent of a stadium announcer endorsing his own hot dog stand.

(d) The legislation in question has been introduced, passed by the House, failed in the Senate, and reintroduced no fewer than four times across two Congresses, which by any reasonable definition makes it a zombie bill, and Congress is unaware of any successful democracy that was saved by the undead.

Section 2. The Bill Comprehension Requirement

2(a). General Mandate

No person shall publicly describe any piece of federal legislation as “common sense” on any social media platform, cable news broadcast, talk radio program, or family group chat unless said person can demonstrate, via a standardized multiple-choice examination administered by the Federal Bureau of Original Thought, that they have:

1. Actually read the bill in question, including the parts after page one
2. Correctly identified at least three specific provisions of the bill, as opposed to summarizing it as “making sure only citizens vote,” which is already the law and has been since 1996
3. Explained, without notes, the difference between the bill and existing federal law on the same topic
4. Acknowledged, in writing, that the Heritage Foundation’s own database documents an average of three cases of noncitizen voting per year nationwide, which is fewer than the number of people struck by lightning in the average Walmart parking lot

2(b). The Kansas Exemption

Any person who can accurately describe the results of Kansas’s proof-of-citizenship voting experiment — in which 31,000 eligible American citizens were blocked from registering while zero elections were altered by noncitizen voting — shall be exempt from the quiz requirement, on the grounds that they have already demonstrated more familiarity with the evidence than approximately 100% of the bill’s most vocal supporters.

Section 3. The Parroting Severity Index

3(a). Establishment

There is hereby established a Parroting Severity Index (PSI), which shall rate social media posts about pending legislation on a scale of 1 to 10:

• 1 — “Independently researched, cited primary sources, may actually be a policy analyst”
• 3 — “Read one article about it, which is more than most”
• 5 — “Retweeted a thread by someone who read one article about it”
• 7 — “Used the phrase ‘election integrity’ without defining it, because nobody ever does”
• 9 — “Posted identical language to forty-seven other accounts within a six-hour window, definitely received a coalition email”
• 10 — “Called opponents TRAITORS in all caps, which historically is the hallmark of calm and reasoned democratic discourse”

3(b). Mandatory Disclosure

Any post receiving a PSI score of 8 or above shall be automatically appended with the following disclaimer:

“This talking point was coordinated through a coalition funded by approximately $590 million in dark money. The author may or may not have read the bill. The odds suggest not.”

Section 4. The Zombie Bill Reintroduction Tax

4(a). Finding of Repetitive Futility

Congress finds that certain pieces of legislation, having been introduced, passed by one chamber, and died in the other, are subsequently reintroduced in an identical or cosmetically altered form, passed by the same chamber again, sent to the other chamber again, and killed again, in a cycle that serves no legislative purpose but generates substantial social media engagement, cable news segments, and fundraising emails.

4(b). The Groundhog Day Surcharge

Any bill introduced for the third or subsequent time under substantially the same provisions shall be subject to a Groundhog Day Surcharge, requiring its sponsors to:

1. Publicly acknowledge the bill’s previous failures and explain what has changed (saying “we have more cosponsors now” does not count)
2. Provide a mathematical accounting of taxpayer resources consumed by repeatedly passing the same legislation through the House, estimated by the Congressional Budget Office at $4.2 million per iteration, or approximately $16.8 million to date for the bill that shall not be named but whose acronym rhymes with “cave”
3. Submit a sworn statement that they will not, upon the bill’s inevitable Senate failure, immediately begin drafting an expanded version with an even more patriotic-sounding name

Section 5. Platform Owner Amplification Disclosure

5(a). Conflict of Interest

When the owner, controlling shareholder, or chief executive of a social media platform uses that platform to promote specific legislation, and said promotion receives viewership exceeding fifty million impressions, and said owner has also publicly threatened opponents of the legislation with language historically associated with capital punishment, the following disclosures shall be required:

1. A prominent label reading: “This post was written by the person who decides what you see on this platform”
2. A link to the platform’s algorithmic amplification policies, assuming they exist, which they may not
3. A real-time counter showing total impressions, so that the public may appreciate the difference between “one person’s opinion” and “the most viewed political content in platform history”

5(b). The TRAITOR Exception

The word “TRAITOR” shall not be used in all capitals to describe elected officials who disagree with your preferred voter registration paperwork requirements. Congress notes that throughout American history, the word “traitor” has been reserved for people who committed actual treason, and that disagreeing about whether a birth certificate should be required at the DMV does not, as of this writing, qualify.

Section 6. Effective Date and Statistical Acknowledgment

This Act shall take effect immediately, or would, if it had any chance of passing, which it does not, because the coordinated opposition has already drafted eighty identical press releases explaining why it is unnecessary.

Congress closes by observing that in the time it took to read this bill, approximately 2,400 social media posts were published describing a different bill as “common sense,” none of which included a citation, and three of which were written by accounts that were created this week.

Committee Note: The sole vote in favor of this bill came from a freshman representative who had accidentally wandered into the wrong hearing room. The 434 votes against were accompanied by 434 identical floor statements, each beginning with the words “This is a common-sense issue.” The irony was noted by the clerk and entered into the record without comment.

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This bill was defeated 434-1, with the lone supporter later clarifying that she thought she was voting on a bill about actual parrots. The bill’s text was subsequently posted on social media by 80 different accounts, all of whom described it as “a dangerous attack on free speech,” using the exact same 280-character summary, distributed via a coalition email at 6:47 AM Eastern on a Tuesday. The Parroting Severity Index posthumously rated the opposition’s response a 10 out of 10.