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"It's not even clear who proposed the new law. "The language, inserted without prior public discussion during recent state Senate deliberations on Ohio's two-ye

"It's not even clear who proposed the new law. "The language, inserted without prior public discussion during recent state Senate deliberations on Ohio's two-year budget, is drawing condemnation from numerous sources. Officials have not said who put the language in the Senate budget document, only that they learned of it for the first time last week," the Akron Beacon Journal wrote on June 13." How did we end up with such a gross lack of accountability? That seems more scandalous than the bad idea itself.

endtime 5y ago
I think it's common for Congress to vote on legislation thousands of pages long well before any of them could possibly have had time to read the final version. So this is, sadly, not surprising.
- bottled_poe 5y ago
  Well then, they are failing to fulfil their responsibilities.
- dlp211 5y ago
  This is a generally overly simplistic take. It would be impossible for any single legislature to read all the bills, so that is not done. The vast majority of large bills are produced ahead of time and only marginal changes are made as the bill gets closer to a final vote. The bills are read ahead of time by key members from each party and almost every legislature's staff.
- WoahNoun 5y ago
  The bill was produced by the legislative staff working for the legislator. I assume their staff read the bill they were in charge of producing.
- cogman10 5y ago
  This is a symptom of the problem. At this point, the only bills we can pass federally are budget reconciliation bills an small token "Juneteenth is a holiday" bills. Why? Primarily because of the senate filibuster rule. We require that 60+ senators agree on every bill passed because every bill gets filibustered. That doesn't work well when you have A: A party that coined the phrase "do nothing democrats" B: A senate minority leader that openly says their job is to stop any legislation from passing. Compromise is dead at this point, because regardless of the compromises made, the minority party will filibuster. So the end result is the only bills that get passed are budget reconciliation bills and those try and cram in everything that could possible be thought as "budgetary" into a single bill. Hence, thousands of pages long legislation. If you want to be mad at giant bills, be mad at the party that filibusters all tiny bills. Go read HR-1 and be mad that THAT bill is being filibustered (make federal voting day a national holiday and extending early voting). Go read any of the small common sense bills that get filibustered simply because they came from the opposing party. And if you really want to get mad, go read up on the Jan 6. investigation bill that had 24 amendments added by republicans and 6 added by democrats that was ultimately filibustered. That's where we are at. We've got Democrats bending over backwards to try and appear bipartisan and Republicans who are playing the game of "The best way to make democrats look bad is to filibuster everything".
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Yeah. My it'll-never-happen dream is that Congress adopts the rule that no member can vote for a bill that they haven't personally read in its entirety. My second it'll-never-happen dream is that the president starts vetoing every bill longer than, say, 100 pages (except perhaps budgets) simply because they are too long. Oddly enough, computers are enabling this. You couldn't get bills thousands of pages long with typewriters, because they get that long with a series of changes. It just wasn't physically possible to re-type it time after time, and then run it through Xerox machines to produce copies for everyone who needed them.
psychometry 5y ago
In the end, it doesn't really matter who inserted the language. All of the Republicans in the legislature are voting for it, so pick any one of them (without loss of generality) to serve as an example. The way the accountability aspect is supposed to work is that voters are horrified and hold their elected representatives accountable by voting them out. As it turns out, though, most people are profoundly ignorant and have no idea who/what they're voting for and lack the intellectual curiosity to figure it out. These voters will just keep getting reamed by their ISPs and if the GOP tells them it's somehow Democrats' fault, they'll probably believe it.
- justin66 5y ago
  Thanks to gerrymandering, most people can have their shit together and awful stuff will still happen.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Representative democracy works when you remember who you voted for, and track whether they work on fulfilling their promises because of which you voted for them. In the US, people mostly remember the president / vice-president names, because they are so widely publicized, some possibly remember the name of their Congress representatives, or can google them up in the rare case when they need to write to them about some issue. AFAICT very few people even remember who did they vote into the state legislature. This is very sad, and certainly disfunctional.
  - WoahNoun 5y ago
    This isn't true. Polling shows people dislike congress but like their congressional rep.
    - binaryblitz 5y ago
      How does that make what he said not true?
      - 5y ago
elliekelly 5y ago
I dream of the day legislation is drafted using git and the public can see the pull request from Comcast Corp. lobbyists adding the language to a Senate staff member's fork of the draft and track it being merged up the tree.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- compiler-guy 5y ago
  Even with git, that is not the way it would happen. The people working on the bills are smarter than that. It is trivial to commit someone else’s patch as your own and without any history if you want to write the script. Just not that hard.
  - raisedbyninjas 5y ago
    Even if the changed was committed by @OfficialComcast, a significant contingent of the temporarily embarrassed millionaires would accept this as the best course of action. After all those captains of industry are experts and probably shouldn't be questioned.
    - SiempreViernes 5y ago
      Captain of industry is an ironic name: a captain is typically someone that has been placed in authority by even higher powers, that's not typically how industry leaders like to describe their ascent.
      - manquer 5y ago
        Captian comes from the Byzantine latin word Katepano, while it can mean "placed at the top", there is no implications of higher authority placing them. Usual interpretations are that the person facually at the top how he got there is not really a factor. Somewhat akin to saying "boss" today.
      - 5y ago
api 5y ago
Everyone looks at Washington, so state and local governments often operate with no public oversight. It can be a complete shitshow of incompetence and corruption, and nobody notices until the lights start going out, the water is poisonous, the pension fund goes bankrupt (because it was looted), etc.
- Loughla 5y ago
  Last presidential election, there was like a 45% voter turnout in our county. It was historic, and they even ran out of ballots in a couple of places during the primary. In the most recent mid-term elections for things like Mayor, road commissioner and county council, the turnout was 8%. 8% of people decided who would do things that ACTUALLY impact the day-to-day life around here. Wonder why only the rich neighborhoods get their streets fixed? BECAUSE THE ELDERLY AND WEALTHY PEOPLE THERE VOTE. Wonder why they're spending an unbelievable amount fixing an out-of-date lake/riverfront to be prettier? BECAUSE THE OLD PEOPLE THERE VOTE IN LOCAL ELECTIONS. Why don't people get this?
  - epistasis 5y ago
    As somebody who has tried really really hard to understand enough local politics so that I even know who I'm voting for, it's really really hard. Not only is there a lack of good information sources, it takes a ton of time to understand the issues and what each of these offices does. And if there's one thing that the elderly and the wealthy have more of than the rest of us, it's time. Time to call up city offices when things are not to one's liking, time to figure out the org charts and bureaucratic relationships, and time to get your neighbors riled up.
    - beart 5y ago
      I agree. During my last local election I sat down with the mail ballot and attempted to find information on all of the candidates. For 90% of these candidates, at best I would end up on a Facebook page with one paragraph describing their position. At worst I couldn't find anything that told me who they even were. I had to guess as to which "John Doe" was the person actually running.
brnt 5y ago
> How did we end up with such a gross lack of accountability? Have a read of Dark Money (Mayer) and/or Democracy in Chains (MacLean) to get a picture of the why and how.
shagie 5y ago
This... gets interesting. From the Congressional Research Service ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Research_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Research_Service ): * The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 and other 1970s Sunshine Reforms - https://www.congressionalresearch.org/LRA.html https://www.congressionalresearch.org/LRA.html I'd point to the graphs (and the various dots below them - there are lots of graphs there). The lack of accountability is a reaction to this (trying to protect the members / lobbyists who helped draft it) with the addition of the current polarization of the various parties in state and federal legislatures.
debacle 5y ago
Absentee democracies where 20% or less of the eligible voting population actually vote.
misiti3780 5y ago
I have said it a million times, and ill say it again: All bills should be edited in a system/software analogous to Github, where the user has to be authenticated (and verified) and edits can be tracked. Of course the lobbyist would hate it, but fuck them.
- manquer 5y ago
  It is tracked already, it is not public of course, but pretty sure privately staffers know where it came from. Things don't magically appear in a bill, it is just that now no one wants to own up to it as they had hoped to slide it in unnoticed.
hourislate 5y ago
>It's not even clear who proposed the new law I'm going to speculate that it's some state legislator who put this in and probably got $1000 dollars in a campaign contribution, a golf game, a dinner and a hooker for the night. That is all it takes to buy a politician these days. The only reason for any uproar is it's now in the open and they're catching shit for it while trying to distance themselves from it. We continuously elect the most stupid, undesirable, corrupt people to represent us at every level of Government. Thank you ATT, Verizon, Spectrum
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> I'm going to speculate that it's some state legislator who put this in and probably got $1000 dollars in a campaign contribution, a golf game, a dinner and a hooker for the night. That is all it takes to buy a politician these days. That's the challenge. When you put someone in charge of money or rules that are not theirs, they become an amplifier for anyone who can find the gate. The problem is that for a big system, someone has to be in charge/have control over it. How do we design it so they actually have the public interest in mind?
cududa 5y ago
Simultaneously, the budget removes funds allocated for rural broadband and redirects the money to a tax break of $22 for the average Ohio family, corporate tax decreases, and about 20% income tax decrease for wealthier folks
superjan 5y ago
First I thought “can only happen in the US”, but I remember that four years ago the dutch coalition government had inserted a very specific tax break in the coalition agreement that no party suggested prior to the election. It served shareholders of two influential companies. Fortunately it was cancelled, it was too embarrassing.
zackees 5y ago
Why can't they just make laws that allow the free market to solve the problem? In the age of wireless and satellite 5G - trying to ramrod muni internet system is a solution looking for a problem. Super suspect.
revscat 5y ago
What would it matter if you had a name to attach to it? The result would be the same, and such a discovery would have little to no effect.

endtime 5y ago

I think it's common for Congress to vote on legislation thousands of pages long well before any of them could possibly have had time to read the final version. So this is, sadly, not surprising.

bottled_poe 5y ago
Well then, they are failing to fulfil their responsibilities.
dlp211 5y ago
This is a generally overly simplistic take. It would be impossible for any single legislature to read all the bills, so that is not done. The vast majority of large bills are produced ahead of time and only marginal changes are made as the bill gets closer to a final vote. The bills are read ahead of time by key members from each party and almost every legislature's staff.
WoahNoun 5y ago
The bill was produced by the legislative staff working for the legislator. I assume their staff read the bill they were in charge of producing.
cogman10 5y ago
This is a symptom of the problem. At this point, the only bills we can pass federally are budget reconciliation bills an small token "Juneteenth is a holiday" bills. Why? Primarily because of the senate filibuster rule. We require that 60+ senators agree on every bill passed because every bill gets filibustered. That doesn't work well when you have A: A party that coined the phrase "do nothing democrats" B: A senate minority leader that openly says their job is to stop any legislation from passing. Compromise is dead at this point, because regardless of the compromises made, the minority party will filibuster. So the end result is the only bills that get passed are budget reconciliation bills and those try and cram in everything that could possible be thought as "budgetary" into a single bill. Hence, thousands of pages long legislation. If you want to be mad at giant bills, be mad at the party that filibusters all tiny bills. Go read HR-1 and be mad that THAT bill is being filibustered (make federal voting day a national holiday and extending early voting). Go read any of the small common sense bills that get filibustered simply because they came from the opposing party. And if you really want to get mad, go read up on the Jan 6. investigation bill that had 24 amendments added by republicans and 6 added by democrats that was ultimately filibustered. That's where we are at. We've got Democrats bending over backwards to try and appear bipartisan and Republicans who are playing the game of "The best way to make democrats look bad is to filibuster everything".
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Yeah. My it'll-never-happen dream is that Congress adopts the rule that no member can vote for a bill that they haven't personally read in its entirety. My second it'll-never-happen dream is that the president starts vetoing every bill longer than, say, 100 pages (except perhaps budgets) simply because they are too long. Oddly enough, computers are enabling this. You couldn't get bills thousands of pages long with typewriters, because they get that long with a series of changes. It just wasn't physically possible to re-type it time after time, and then run it through Xerox machines to produce copies for everyone who needed them.

psychometry 5y ago

In the end, it doesn't really matter who inserted the language. All of the Republicans in the legislature are voting for it, so pick any one of them (without loss of generality) to serve as an example. The way the accountability aspect is supposed to work is that voters are horrified and hold their elected representatives accountable by voting them out. As it turns out, though, most people are profoundly ignorant and have no idea who/what they're voting for and lack the intellectual curiosity to figure it out. These voters will just keep getting reamed by their ISPs and if the GOP tells them it's somehow Democrats' fault, they'll probably believe it.

justin66 5y ago
Thanks to gerrymandering, most people can have their shit together and awful stuff will still happen.
nine_k 5y ago
Representative democracy works when you remember who you voted for, and track whether they work on fulfilling their promises because of which you voted for them. In the US, people mostly remember the president / vice-president names, because they are so widely publicized, some possibly remember the name of their Congress representatives, or can google them up in the rare case when they need to write to them about some issue. AFAICT very few people even remember who did they vote into the state legislature. This is very sad, and certainly disfunctional.
- WoahNoun 5y ago
  This isn't true. Polling shows people dislike congress but like their congressional rep.
  - binaryblitz 5y ago
    How does that make what he said not true?
    - 5y ago

elliekelly 5y ago

I dream of the day legislation is drafted using git and the public can see the pull request from Comcast Corp. lobbyists adding the language to a Senate staff member's fork of the draft and track it being merged up the tree.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
compiler-guy 5y ago
Even with git, that is not the way it would happen. The people working on the bills are smarter than that. It is trivial to commit someone else’s patch as your own and without any history if you want to write the script. Just not that hard.
- raisedbyninjas 5y ago
  Even if the changed was committed by @OfficialComcast, a significant contingent of the temporarily embarrassed millionaires would accept this as the best course of action. After all those captains of industry are experts and probably shouldn't be questioned.
  - SiempreViernes 5y ago
    Captain of industry is an ironic name: a captain is typically someone that has been placed in authority by even higher powers, that's not typically how industry leaders like to describe their ascent.
    - manquer 5y ago
      Captian comes from the Byzantine latin word Katepano, while it can mean "placed at the top", there is no implications of higher authority placing them. Usual interpretations are that the person facually at the top how he got there is not really a factor. Somewhat akin to saying "boss" today.
    - 5y ago

api 5y ago

Everyone looks at Washington, so state and local governments often operate with no public oversight. It can be a complete shitshow of incompetence and corruption, and nobody notices until the lights start going out, the water is poisonous, the pension fund goes bankrupt (because it was looted), etc.

Loughla 5y ago
Last presidential election, there was like a 45% voter turnout in our county. It was historic, and they even ran out of ballots in a couple of places during the primary. In the most recent mid-term elections for things like Mayor, road commissioner and county council, the turnout was 8%. 8% of people decided who would do things that ACTUALLY impact the day-to-day life around here. Wonder why only the rich neighborhoods get their streets fixed? BECAUSE THE ELDERLY AND WEALTHY PEOPLE THERE VOTE. Wonder why they're spending an unbelievable amount fixing an out-of-date lake/riverfront to be prettier? BECAUSE THE OLD PEOPLE THERE VOTE IN LOCAL ELECTIONS. Why don't people get this?
- epistasis 5y ago
  As somebody who has tried really really hard to understand enough local politics so that I even know who I'm voting for, it's really really hard. Not only is there a lack of good information sources, it takes a ton of time to understand the issues and what each of these offices does. And if there's one thing that the elderly and the wealthy have more of than the rest of us, it's time. Time to call up city offices when things are not to one's liking, time to figure out the org charts and bureaucratic relationships, and time to get your neighbors riled up.
  - beart 5y ago
    I agree. During my last local election I sat down with the mail ballot and attempted to find information on all of the candidates. For 90% of these candidates, at best I would end up on a Facebook page with one paragraph describing their position. At worst I couldn't find anything that told me who they even were. I had to guess as to which "John Doe" was the person actually running.

brnt 5y ago

> How did we end up with such a gross lack of accountability? Have a read of Dark Money (Mayer) and/or Democracy in Chains (MacLean) to get a picture of the why and how.

shagie 5y ago

This... gets interesting. From the Congressional Research Service ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Research_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Research_Service ): * The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 and other 1970s Sunshine Reforms - https://www.congressionalresearch.org/LRA.html https://www.congressionalresearch.org/LRA.html I'd point to the graphs (and the various dots below them - there are lots of graphs there). The lack of accountability is a reaction to this (trying to protect the members / lobbyists who helped draft it) with the addition of the current polarization of the various parties in state and federal legislatures.

debacle 5y ago

Absentee democracies where 20% or less of the eligible voting population actually vote.

misiti3780 5y ago

I have said it a million times, and ill say it again: All bills should be edited in a system/software analogous to Github, where the user has to be authenticated (and verified) and edits can be tracked. Of course the lobbyist would hate it, but fuck them.

manquer 5y ago
It is tracked already, it is not public of course, but pretty sure privately staffers know where it came from. Things don't magically appear in a bill, it is just that now no one wants to own up to it as they had hoped to slide it in unnoticed.

hourislate 5y ago

>It's not even clear who proposed the new law I'm going to speculate that it's some state legislator who put this in and probably got $1000 dollars in a campaign contribution, a golf game, a dinner and a hooker for the night. That is all it takes to buy a politician these days. The only reason for any uproar is it's now in the open and they're catching shit for it while trying to distance themselves from it. We continuously elect the most stupid, undesirable, corrupt people to represent us at every level of Government. Thank you ATT, Verizon, Spectrum

phkahler 5y ago
>> I'm going to speculate that it's some state legislator who put this in and probably got $1000 dollars in a campaign contribution, a golf game, a dinner and a hooker for the night. That is all it takes to buy a politician these days. That's the challenge. When you put someone in charge of money or rules that are not theirs, they become an amplifier for anyone who can find the gate. The problem is that for a big system, someone has to be in charge/have control over it. How do we design it so they actually have the public interest in mind?

cududa 5y ago

Simultaneously, the budget removes funds allocated for rural broadband and redirects the money to a tax break of $22 for the average Ohio family, corporate tax decreases, and about 20% income tax decrease for wealthier folks

superjan 5y ago

First I thought “can only happen in the US”, but I remember that four years ago the dutch coalition government had inserted a very specific tax break in the coalition agreement that no party suggested prior to the election. It served shareholders of two influential companies. Fortunately it was cancelled, it was too embarrassing.

zackees 5y ago

Why can't they just make laws that allow the free market to solve the problem? In the age of wireless and satellite 5G - trying to ramrod muni internet system is a solution looking for a problem. Super suspect.

revscat 5y ago

What would it matter if you had a name to attach to it? The result would be the same, and such a discovery would have little to no effect.