JEFFERSON CITY, MO — State Rep. Carla Redmond (D-Kansas City) introduced a bill Monday that would require all future legislation in the Missouri General Assembly to be written at or below a fifth-grade reading level, a standard that multiple colleagues on both sides of the aisle acknowledged would represent “a significant improvement over current practice.”

The bill, designated HB 1142 and titled “The Plain Language Governance Act,” was itself written at a third-grade reading level as a demonstration. It contains no Latin phrases, no nested subordinate clauses, and no sentences longer than fifteen words. Legislative staff confirmed it is the most widely read piece of legislation introduced this session.

“I read the whole thing in four minutes,” said Rep. Dale Hutchins (R-Springfield). “That has literally never happened to me before. I usually read the title and then ask my aide what it does.”

“If a ten-year-old can’t understand what we’re voting on, maybe we shouldn’t be voting on it. Or maybe we don’t understand it either. Both are possible.”

Redmond offered the above comment during a press conference, adding that she ran the text of six bills passed last session through a standard readability analyzer and that four scored at a post-graduate level. One, a tax code amendment, scored “beyond measurable human reading level,” a result the analyzer flagged as “possibly not English.”

Critics of the bill argue that legal language requires precision that simplified writing cannot achieve. Redmond countered that “if the King James Bible can explain the creation of the universe in words a child can follow, we can probably manage a highway funding bill.”

At press time, the bill had been referred to the Rules Committee, where it was rewritten in language that no one outside the committee could understand.