12 ms·

> Music Modernization Act I don't know if/how it could legally be done, but I'd love to see "cute" names for laws barred from use in Congress. Refer to them a

by JackCh 8y ago

> Music Modernization Act I don't know if/how it could legally be done, but I'd love to see "cute" names for laws barred from use in Congress. Refer to them all by number not brand names dreamed up by marketing professionals to make the proposed law seem unassailable ("Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act" aka USA PATRIOT Act).

rayiner 8y ago
The focus of the act is actually on modernizing licensing for streaming: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/congress-is-giving-musicians-first-chance-of-fair-pay-in-decades-w520301 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/congress-is-giving-m....
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  The important thing here is that primarily good MMA has been bundled with the CLASSICS Act. From the EFF commentary: "The CLASSICS Act gives nothing back to the public. It doesn’t increase access to pre-1972 recordings, which are already played regularly on Internet radio. And it doesn’t let the public use these recordings without permission any sooner. While some recording artists and their heirs will receive money under the act, the main beneficiaries will be recording companies, who will control the use of classic recordings for another fifty years. Important recordings from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s won’t enter the public domain until 2067. And users of recordings that are already over 90 years old will face the risk of federal copyright’s massive, unpredictable penalties." This is much, much more about record labels getting money rather than creators of content. The industry already heavily rewards purveyors rather than generators; if anything, this makes things worse.
  - infogulch 8y ago
    There has got to be a way of preventing "bundling". Bundling unrelated laws together is the cause of so much strife. Tacking shitty laws onto good ones, sneaking in some obscure clause that gives some senator a tax break that nobody noticed or they ignore because they want the rest of the bill, a highly favorable bi-partisan bill turned into a partisan issue because a clause that furthers the interests of the party that introduced it, and inane strawman accusations that follow because now it's easy to paint someone as the bad guy that is trying to undermine this universally good bill (nevermind that their holdup is this one completely unrelated clause). The whole quid-pro-quo political economy exists because this is possible (I vote for your bill with your pet clause, and you vote for mine.) A big part of the deterioration of current state of political discourse in the US could be attributed to this one issue. I have no conception of how such a limit on the content of bills could be defined and enforced while maintaining the balance of power, but the current system is insanity.
    - wahern 8y ago
      One of the most prominent recent efforts was the line-item veto, but the Supreme Court (rightly) said that it requires a constitutional amendment. You also have to be careful what you wish for. For years everybody bemoaned so-called earmarking. Congress finally prohibited earmarking in their procedures. But many academics have suggested that an unintended consequence was less compromise and greater partisanship in Congress. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earmark_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earmark_(politics) At the end of the day lawmaking and especially budgeting is fundamentally an ugly business. We should be careful about being overly cynical or fatalistic about it. The most important thing is transparency, but that requires the electorate to be more practically minded and less idealistic.
      - stochastic_monk 8y ago
        There's a difference between allowing a line-item veto (which is a very bad, dangerous thing) and something which prevents unrelated legislation from being packaged together.
      - infogulch 8y ago
        Line-item veto sounds interesting, but extremely dangerous. Some bills meanings and intent could be completely reversed by vetoing a single provision in e.g. definitions section. This wouldn't fix the bundling issue, it would just make the president another party in it, and give them super-congressman powers with the ability to essentially make legislature all by themselves. (And the first couple of paragraphs on the wikipedia article [1] confirm this.) You're right about being careful what you wish for. That's half of the reason why I didn't try to present a solution: the problem is conceptually clear, but any specific solution will be muddied by the complexities of reality. Here's my idea anyway: an independent legislative committee whose purpose is to find bundling in bills and can split/veto/force a rewrite before it can be voted on. A supermajority vote can override it. While we're at it, lets also task it with creating an official name that describes the bill without "cutsie" nicknames that misrepresent the content. But as with most "do it with a committee" solutions, this just pushes the problem down a level. We still need solid definitions for things like "bundled" and "related" and "representative" and a way to evaluate the effectiveness of the committee and to challenge their decisions (supreme court? ugh). So I guess this is less a solution and more just a different way to describe the problem. Feel free to tear the above apart, but that's kind of the point. I'm glad I'm not the one making laws. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_S...
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    Recordings won't ever enter the public domain, because when this is up for renewal in 2067 it will get extended again.
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    "Important recordings from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s won’t enter the public domain until 2067." If we're lucky. More likely, before 2067 rolls around they'll "modernize" copyright again by extending it another hundred years.
WiseWeasel 8y ago
The Orwell Act: Proposed legislation names shall henceforth be limited to the following verbs and adjectives: verbs: prevent, promote adjectives: good, ungood Edit: More seriously, laws should be named with the same rules that apply to good commit messages, concisely describing the change being made. Or maybe they're more like pull requests... point is, you should be able to go down the list of them and get a good feel for the activity.
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  You can already do that: just assume a bill does the opposite of what it says it does.
  - sli 8y ago
    Oftentimes, it even does the opposite of what the given description says. For example, there was a solar law on the ballot in Florida in 2016 that was written by oil and gas companies, that basically would have created a charge just for having solar panels. The new cost was to simply subsidize energy companies losing revenue from people moving to solar. Predictably, the bill was sold pretty heavily as a pro-solar bill meant to make solar more competitive. Much in the same way anti-NN is often sold as a method of making it easier for smaller ISPs to compete with the giga-ISPs. The word "wytai" from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows comes to mind when I think about how much of the US political process is based almost entirely on deception and tricking people into voting your way.
    - InitialLastName 8y ago
      > Predictably, the bill was sold pretty heavily as a pro-solar bill meant to make solar more competitive. You can make something "more competitive" in two ways; kneecapping a leading industry does just as much "making competitive" as lifting up a tailing industry.
ookware 8y ago
You need a Cut Undemocratic Naming Titles bill
- ModernMech 8y ago
  Uncalled for.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> I don't know if/how it could legally be done, but I'd love to see "cute" names for laws barred from use in Congress. It can't even in principal be done in a binding way in mere statute, since newer law wins in case of a conflict, and even were it done by Constitutional Amendment, it would be hard to give it teeth. Plus, it's plenty useful to have memorable named for laws, rather having to remember bill/session numbers (or, worse, the weird practice in California and some other places where laws, even when they actually have friendly names, are frequently referred to by bill numbers without session numbers, even long after adoption, when such identifiers are decidedly non-unique.)
- mcny 8y ago
  > Plus, it's plenty useful to have memorable named for laws, rather having to remember bill/session numbers (or, worse, the weird practice in California and some other places where laws, even when they actually have friendly names, are frequently referred to by bill numbers without session numbers, even long after adoption, when such identifiers are decidedly non-unique.) That's very easy to fix by adding the year and jurisdiction where appropriate. For example, in my opinion, Prop 8 does not need any qualifier but should there be any ambiguity we could call it the 2008 California Prop 8. I don't think the value is there in banning names though. For example, the CFAA* would be just as horrible with any other name. *While we are at it, please support a complete repeal of the CFAA. https://www.eff.org/helpout https://www.eff.org/helpout
- pmyteh 8y ago
  This is a great example of the power of norms and conventions. As sibling says, Erskine May in the UK bans tendentious titles. It's not a statutory restriction and could be easily overturned by the House of Commons if it wanted. But no government has had the HoC do that, partly through inertia and partly because that government would then face partisan bill titles when next in opposition. So the convention endures. The British constitution is, in some ways, built on conventions like this. It changes the calculus from legal to normative, and allows a sustainable banning of cute names even though, as you say, it can't be done in a binding way even in principle.
  - 8y ago
andrei_says_ 8y ago
This would be a great way to prevent polititians from framing the bills. For more on framing, see George Lakoff’s lecture on moral politics — reveals the way political language uses metaphors and How framing a debate ensures its outcome. Repeating the frame reinforces the intended meaning. Merely Using the name of the bill defines its outcome. “Tax Relief” - no one wants to fight a “relief” effort. Tax cuts for the rich would be the correct name. “Clear sky initiative” is the name of a clear cutting bill. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5f9R9MtkpqM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5f9R9MtkpqM
- ModernMech 8y ago
  Last year, the senate called their bill that would strip millions of healthcare the "Better Care Reconciliation Act"
  - giggles_giggles 8y ago
    "Reconciliation" seems to be the choice euphemism for budget cuts. I was reviewing some legislation (https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/sconres36/text https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/sconres36/text) recently which failed to pass (budget slashing proposed by Rand Paul) and noticed that almost the entire text of the bill itself is "X Reconciliation", "Y Reconciliation".
    - gjm11 8y ago
      Isn't that just because it used the process whose name is "reconciliation", which allows certain kinds of legislation to make its way through the Senate and the House with simple majorities and thus avoid filibustering? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_(United_States_Congress) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_(United_States_...
  - cvwright 8y ago
    > strip millions of healthcare That's a funny way to say "stop forcing people to buy healthcare".
  - deleted 8y ago
RankingMember 8y ago
I agree completely. I'd like to see some sort of "No More Orwellian Names" act. The titles would be obtained using some kind of algorithm run on the bill text. But then, lawmakers would screw with the text until the algorithm returned the title they wanted. D'oh...keeping people from working around regulations is difficult.
- lainga 8y ago
  The Mu$1c __ModERNizAtion[1] /-\ct \x00 please find attached as per usual, regards\n Dr. Mr. Orrin Hatch of 2018 [1] various characters replaced with their equivalents from the Cyrillic codepage
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    The User Input Santization'); DROP TABLE users;-- Act of 2023.
jasonkostempski 8y ago
I agree but the people talking about them would just nickname them anyway. Then I guess it would just be a matter of which nickname gets the most coverage, the feel-good name, the accurate name, or the scary name. Maybe that at least gives us a fighting chance.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jjoonathan 8y ago
How about having a mechanism to allow the opposition to vote on a secondary name which will be included alongside the primary name in official correspondence? Yes, it will degrade into "Bill to Save America / Bill to Destroy America" most of the time, but that's the point: it makes the absurdity easy to spot and difficult to ignore.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- airstrike 8y ago
  This is actually an amazing idea.
wahern 8y ago
Under traditional Parliamentary procedure the so-called long title of a bill circumscribed its effect. But for various reasons this was never a rule that courts felt empowered to enforce. British Parliament (to a greater extent) and Congress (to a lesser extent) adhered to the rule for a long time, but I think in the modern era it's really of no consequence any longer. Among other reasons, like corporate charters long titles now often include vague language that negate any limiting effect. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_and_long_titles_(legislation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_and_long_titles_(legisla...
erentz 8y ago
Completely agree. Take the branding out of law making. In my home country and I think most former commonwealth countries you instead see acts with names that are simple and semi hierarchical, e.g. this would just be something like “Copyrights (Ammendment) Act 2018”. Got a new change to a crime? Well that all goes in the Crimes act, so that would be the “Crimes (Ammendment) Act 2018” instead of the “Drugs Are Anti Patriotic and Congress Persons Spensoring this Are Good Vote For US” act. Far simpler and saner.
flother 8y ago
In the UK, at least, there are rules against this. A government bill’s short title > must describe the content of the bill in a straightforwardly factual manner. An argumentative title or a slogan is not permitted. From Erskine May, what the Financial Times calls “the bible on parliamentary procedure”. https://www.ft.com/content/05253602-ce4a-3f64-8ace-6a6f0387603f https://www.ft.com/content/05253602-ce4a-3f64-8ace-6a6f03876...
- craftyguy 8y ago
  The problem is that such a bill to do the same in the US would probably violate itself with a cute name.
snowwrestler 8y ago
The marginal return on this is probably a lot lower than you would think. Very few people ever know the names of the laws that are passed, and when the names are publicized, it is to mock them at least as often as it is to somehow fool people. The vast majority of people in the U.S. do not follow what Congress is doing. They follow what media sources say Congress is doing. And media sources tend to focus on what bills will do. I would argue that legislation names just do not matter. Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare are among well-known government progams whose names were not even in the titles of their enacting legislation.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
  As a counter argument, I think the PATRIOT act might have not gotten as much popular support had it born a name more accurate to what the bill actually covered.
jackhack 8y ago
Good luck. We can't get them to stop ignoring wide swaths of the Constitution. Even if it were to pass, I wouldn't hold my breath hoping they would begin obeying some minor procedural rule.
s2g 8y ago
Would the patriot act be anywhere near as infamous if it was just some generic hard to remember number?
f137 8y ago
I first misread it as > Music Monetization Act

by JackCh 8y ago

rayiner 8y ago

The focus of the act is actually on modernizing licensing for streaming: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/congress-is-giving-musicians-first-chance-of-fair-pay-in-decades-w520301 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/congress-is-giving-m....

stochastic_monk 8y ago
The important thing here is that primarily good MMA has been bundled with the CLASSICS Act. From the EFF commentary: "The CLASSICS Act gives nothing back to the public. It doesn’t increase access to pre-1972 recordings, which are already played regularly on Internet radio. And it doesn’t let the public use these recordings without permission any sooner. While some recording artists and their heirs will receive money under the act, the main beneficiaries will be recording companies, who will control the use of classic recordings for another fifty years. Important recordings from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s won’t enter the public domain until 2067. And users of recordings that are already over 90 years old will face the risk of federal copyright’s massive, unpredictable penalties." This is much, much more about record labels getting money rather than creators of content. The industry already heavily rewards purveyors rather than generators; if anything, this makes things worse.
- infogulch 8y ago
  There has got to be a way of preventing "bundling". Bundling unrelated laws together is the cause of so much strife. Tacking shitty laws onto good ones, sneaking in some obscure clause that gives some senator a tax break that nobody noticed or they ignore because they want the rest of the bill, a highly favorable bi-partisan bill turned into a partisan issue because a clause that furthers the interests of the party that introduced it, and inane strawman accusations that follow because now it's easy to paint someone as the bad guy that is trying to undermine this universally good bill (nevermind that their holdup is this one completely unrelated clause). The whole quid-pro-quo political economy exists because this is possible (I vote for your bill with your pet clause, and you vote for mine.) A big part of the deterioration of current state of political discourse in the US could be attributed to this one issue. I have no conception of how such a limit on the content of bills could be defined and enforced while maintaining the balance of power, but the current system is insanity.
  - wahern 8y ago
    One of the most prominent recent efforts was the line-item veto, but the Supreme Court (rightly) said that it requires a constitutional amendment. You also have to be careful what you wish for. For years everybody bemoaned so-called earmarking. Congress finally prohibited earmarking in their procedures. But many academics have suggested that an unintended consequence was less compromise and greater partisanship in Congress. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earmark_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earmark_(politics) At the end of the day lawmaking and especially budgeting is fundamentally an ugly business. We should be careful about being overly cynical or fatalistic about it. The most important thing is transparency, but that requires the electorate to be more practically minded and less idealistic.
    - stochastic_monk 8y ago
      There's a difference between allowing a line-item veto (which is a very bad, dangerous thing) and something which prevents unrelated legislation from being packaged together.
    - infogulch 8y ago
      Line-item veto sounds interesting, but extremely dangerous. Some bills meanings and intent could be completely reversed by vetoing a single provision in e.g. definitions section. This wouldn't fix the bundling issue, it would just make the president another party in it, and give them super-congressman powers with the ability to essentially make legislature all by themselves. (And the first couple of paragraphs on the wikipedia article [1] confirm this.) You're right about being careful what you wish for. That's half of the reason why I didn't try to present a solution: the problem is conceptually clear, but any specific solution will be muddied by the complexities of reality. Here's my idea anyway: an independent legislative committee whose purpose is to find bundling in bills and can split/veto/force a rewrite before it can be voted on. A supermajority vote can override it. While we're at it, lets also task it with creating an official name that describes the bill without "cutsie" nicknames that misrepresent the content. But as with most "do it with a committee" solutions, this just pushes the problem down a level. We still need solid definitions for things like "bundled" and "related" and "representative" and a way to evaluate the effectiveness of the committee and to challenge their decisions (supreme court? ugh). So I guess this is less a solution and more just a different way to describe the problem. Feel free to tear the above apart, but that's kind of the point. I'm glad I'm not the one making laws. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_S...
- tomc1985 8y ago
  Recordings won't ever enter the public domain, because when this is up for renewal in 2067 it will get extended again.
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  "Important recordings from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s won’t enter the public domain until 2067." If we're lucky. More likely, before 2067 rolls around they'll "modernize" copyright again by extending it another hundred years.

WiseWeasel 8y ago

The Orwell Act: Proposed legislation names shall henceforth be limited to the following verbs and adjectives: verbs: prevent, promote adjectives: good, ungood Edit: More seriously, laws should be named with the same rules that apply to good commit messages, concisely describing the change being made. Or maybe they're more like pull requests... point is, you should be able to go down the list of them and get a good feel for the activity.

jjoonathan 8y ago
You can already do that: just assume a bill does the opposite of what it says it does.
- sli 8y ago
  Oftentimes, it even does the opposite of what the given description says. For example, there was a solar law on the ballot in Florida in 2016 that was written by oil and gas companies, that basically would have created a charge just for having solar panels. The new cost was to simply subsidize energy companies losing revenue from people moving to solar. Predictably, the bill was sold pretty heavily as a pro-solar bill meant to make solar more competitive. Much in the same way anti-NN is often sold as a method of making it easier for smaller ISPs to compete with the giga-ISPs. The word "wytai" from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows comes to mind when I think about how much of the US political process is based almost entirely on deception and tricking people into voting your way.
  - InitialLastName 8y ago
    > Predictably, the bill was sold pretty heavily as a pro-solar bill meant to make solar more competitive. You can make something "more competitive" in two ways; kneecapping a leading industry does just as much "making competitive" as lifting up a tailing industry.

ookware 8y ago

You need a Cut Undemocratic Naming Titles bill

ModernMech 8y ago
Uncalled for.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> I don't know if/how it could legally be done, but I'd love to see "cute" names for laws barred from use in Congress. It can't even in principal be done in a binding way in mere statute, since newer law wins in case of a conflict, and even were it done by Constitutional Amendment, it would be hard to give it teeth. Plus, it's plenty useful to have memorable named for laws, rather having to remember bill/session numbers (or, worse, the weird practice in California and some other places where laws, even when they actually have friendly names, are frequently referred to by bill numbers without session numbers, even long after adoption, when such identifiers are decidedly non-unique.)

mcny 8y ago
> Plus, it's plenty useful to have memorable named for laws, rather having to remember bill/session numbers (or, worse, the weird practice in California and some other places where laws, even when they actually have friendly names, are frequently referred to by bill numbers without session numbers, even long after adoption, when such identifiers are decidedly non-unique.) That's very easy to fix by adding the year and jurisdiction where appropriate. For example, in my opinion, Prop 8 does not need any qualifier but should there be any ambiguity we could call it the 2008 California Prop 8. I don't think the value is there in banning names though. For example, the CFAA* would be just as horrible with any other name. *While we are at it, please support a complete repeal of the CFAA. https://www.eff.org/helpout https://www.eff.org/helpout
pmyteh 8y ago
This is a great example of the power of norms and conventions. As sibling says, Erskine May in the UK bans tendentious titles. It's not a statutory restriction and could be easily overturned by the House of Commons if it wanted. But no government has had the HoC do that, partly through inertia and partly because that government would then face partisan bill titles when next in opposition. So the convention endures. The British constitution is, in some ways, built on conventions like this. It changes the calculus from legal to normative, and allows a sustainable banning of cute names even though, as you say, it can't be done in a binding way even in principle.
- 8y ago

andrei_says_ 8y ago

This would be a great way to prevent polititians from framing the bills. For more on framing, see George Lakoff’s lecture on moral politics — reveals the way political language uses metaphors and How framing a debate ensures its outcome. Repeating the frame reinforces the intended meaning. Merely Using the name of the bill defines its outcome. “Tax Relief” - no one wants to fight a “relief” effort. Tax cuts for the rich would be the correct name. “Clear sky initiative” is the name of a clear cutting bill. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5f9R9MtkpqM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5f9R9MtkpqM

ModernMech 8y ago
Last year, the senate called their bill that would strip millions of healthcare the "Better Care Reconciliation Act"
- giggles_giggles 8y ago
  "Reconciliation" seems to be the choice euphemism for budget cuts. I was reviewing some legislation (https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/sconres36/text https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/sconres36/text) recently which failed to pass (budget slashing proposed by Rand Paul) and noticed that almost the entire text of the bill itself is "X Reconciliation", "Y Reconciliation".
  - gjm11 8y ago
    Isn't that just because it used the process whose name is "reconciliation", which allows certain kinds of legislation to make its way through the Senate and the House with simple majorities and thus avoid filibustering? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_(United_States_Congress) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_(United_States_...
- cvwright 8y ago
  > strip millions of healthcare That's a funny way to say "stop forcing people to buy healthcare".
- deleted 8y ago

RankingMember 8y ago

I agree completely. I'd like to see some sort of "No More Orwellian Names" act. The titles would be obtained using some kind of algorithm run on the bill text. But then, lawmakers would screw with the text until the algorithm returned the title they wanted. D'oh...keeping people from working around regulations is difficult.

lainga 8y ago
The Mu$1c __ModERNizAtion[1] /-\ct \x00 please find attached as per usual, regards\n Dr. Mr. Orrin Hatch of 2018 [1] various characters replaced with their equivalents from the Cyrillic codepage
- saalweachter 8y ago
  The User Input Santization'); DROP TABLE users;-- Act of 2023.

jasonkostempski 8y ago

I agree but the people talking about them would just nickname them anyway. Then I guess it would just be a matter of which nickname gets the most coverage, the feel-good name, the accurate name, or the scary name. Maybe that at least gives us a fighting chance.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jjoonathan 8y ago

How about having a mechanism to allow the opposition to vote on a secondary name which will be included alongside the primary name in official correspondence? Yes, it will degrade into "Bill to Save America / Bill to Destroy America" most of the time, but that's the point: it makes the absurdity easy to spot and difficult to ignore.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
airstrike 8y ago
This is actually an amazing idea.

wahern 8y ago

Under traditional Parliamentary procedure the so-called long title of a bill circumscribed its effect. But for various reasons this was never a rule that courts felt empowered to enforce. British Parliament (to a greater extent) and Congress (to a lesser extent) adhered to the rule for a long time, but I think in the modern era it's really of no consequence any longer. Among other reasons, like corporate charters long titles now often include vague language that negate any limiting effect. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_and_long_titles_(legislation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_and_long_titles_(legisla...

erentz 8y ago

Completely agree. Take the branding out of law making. In my home country and I think most former commonwealth countries you instead see acts with names that are simple and semi hierarchical, e.g. this would just be something like “Copyrights (Ammendment) Act 2018”. Got a new change to a crime? Well that all goes in the Crimes act, so that would be the “Crimes (Ammendment) Act 2018” instead of the “Drugs Are Anti Patriotic and Congress Persons Spensoring this Are Good Vote For US” act. Far simpler and saner.

flother 8y ago

In the UK, at least, there are rules against this. A government bill’s short title > must describe the content of the bill in a straightforwardly factual manner. An argumentative title or a slogan is not permitted. From Erskine May, what the Financial Times calls “the bible on parliamentary procedure”. https://www.ft.com/content/05253602-ce4a-3f64-8ace-6a6f0387603f https://www.ft.com/content/05253602-ce4a-3f64-8ace-6a6f03876...

craftyguy 8y ago
The problem is that such a bill to do the same in the US would probably violate itself with a cute name.

snowwrestler 8y ago

The marginal return on this is probably a lot lower than you would think. Very few people ever know the names of the laws that are passed, and when the names are publicized, it is to mock them at least as often as it is to somehow fool people. The vast majority of people in the U.S. do not follow what Congress is doing. They follow what media sources say Congress is doing. And media sources tend to focus on what bills will do. I would argue that legislation names just do not matter. Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare are among well-known government progams whose names were not even in the titles of their enacting legislation.

SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
As a counter argument, I think the PATRIOT act might have not gotten as much popular support had it born a name more accurate to what the bill actually covered.

jackhack 8y ago

Good luck. We can't get them to stop ignoring wide swaths of the Constitution. Even if it were to pass, I wouldn't hold my breath hoping they would begin obeying some minor procedural rule.

s2g 8y ago

Would the patriot act be anywhere near as infamous if it was just some generic hard to remember number?

f137 8y ago

I first misread it as > Music Monetization Act