5 ms·

Tangential, but it's preposterously stupid that our legal system works by legislators voting on a giant collection of laws bundled together, rather than separat

Tangential, but it's preposterously stupid that our legal system works by legislators voting on a giant collection of laws bundled together, rather than separating these things into entities with specific concerns and voting on those. Shouldn't it be reasonable for someone to think the infrastructure bill is a good idea but this part is not?

breadzeppelin__ 5y ago
I often try to think of a rule that would require simplified bills without just having arbitrary limits. Like, wouldn't it be nice if each thing voted on had to be less than 8 pages (for example) in length instead of 3000. I'm sure there is some downside though like how will we fit all the pork in to this vote??!?
- louloulou 5y ago
  It should be +1 day per page before it can be voted on. It's completely absurd that the people voting on these bills don't have the chance to read and understand them before having to give an opinion and change the laws governing >300M people. The whole thing makes a mockery of representative democracy.
  - koolba 5y ago
    And +1 day per X% of GDP being spent would be nice too.
    - louloulou 5y ago
      And a max number of pages per day limit
  - idrios 5y ago
    Instead of 1 bill with 3000 pages, you'd have 3000 bills that are each 1 page. Frankly, that's a great outcome and this a great idea.
- KMag 5y ago
  Not just pork, but also more productive forms of legislative compromise would be affected by such limitations.
  - breadzeppelin__ 5y ago
    yea that makes sense. That's why I always wonder if there's a GOOD way to force simplification
snarf21 5y ago
It is the nature of compromise for 50-60 people. The thing that is more stupid in my mind is that they all only care about getting their pork barrel. I don't understand why some don't revoke their support for things that are too blatant. Unfortunately, our political system is all about money in and kickbacks out. Classic system of misaligned incentives.
Blackthorn 5y ago
This is entirely due to the necessity of 60 votes to pass a normal bill vs 50 for a reconciliation bill.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
landemva 5y ago
If the 'someone' is the person who can veto it, then we should expect that 'someone' to sign it into law. I suppose we get what we allow and what we voted in to office.
UnpossibleJim 5y ago
I mean, if we lived in a reasonable society, riders would be abolished.
CabSauce 5y ago
Unfortunately, anything passed in the senate requires 60 votes or need to be passed during reconcilliation (one bill per year). This is due to the use of the fillibuster to stop anything else from being considered.
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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nickff 5y ago
The reason for this is that most legislation wouldn't pass without the amendments; the amendments contain 'pork' and special interest legislation that encourages legislators who are on the fence or even mildly opposed, to vote for the bill. Some of the most well-documented examples of this are the amendments to the ACA (Obamacare), which include the infamous 'corn-husker kickback'.
- hallway_monitor 5y ago
  Yes everyone knows about that carve out in the ACA. But does everyone know it was removed, allegedly at Nebraska senator Nelson's request, before the legislation went into effect?
  - nickff 5y ago
    That one was removed, but a number of others remained: https://www.politico.com/story/2009/12/payoffs-for-states-get-reid-to-60-030815 https://www.politico.com/story/2009/12/payoffs-for-states-ge...
- Djrhfbfnsks 5y ago
  I don't think it's a bad thing that most current legislation wouldn't pass as-is. If it's not popular enough to reach the required threshold on its own, then it shouldn't become law.
jrochkind1 5y ago
Who _actually_ decides if it gets in the bill, anyway? And who actually writes it? Often industry. In this case maybe law enforcement?
idrios 5y ago
My job complains when I make a pull request that includes more than a few hundred lines of code and tells me to break it up into smaller, more readable changes. But for the US govt a 2700 page bill that congressmen get only a couple of days or hours to review seems to be the norm.
- notJim 5y ago
  I think there's actually a helpful analogy to software development here. If your company can only release once every 2–8 years, then naturally the releases would become huge. Unfortunately, our government is so bogged down by divisiveness and the filibuster, etc, that is the state we're in. Except in cases of near outright catastrophe, the only substantive thing they can pass is the budget reconciliation bill, which only requires a majority instead of a super-majority. As a result, that bill becomes enormous, just like the software release. As with software, the fix is likely to make it easier to pass more small bills, but the very systems that lead to the current status quo make reforming it nearly impossible.
  - nybble41 5y ago
    > Except in cases of near outright catastrophe, the only substantive thing they can pass is the budget reconciliation bill, which only requires a majority instead of a super-majority. The fact that they want to pass bills which only have a bare majority and not a super-majority is a big part of the problem. If you can't get super-majority (or more like near-unanimous) approval for your bill, odds are that it's not good law or something the government ought to be doing. But the focus is always on these huge, controversial proposals with razor-thin margins and getting them passed over the strenuous objection of approximately half of Congress and a large fraction or possibly even a majority of the population at large. In short, the system is utterly broken.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      To be honest, at this point whether some policy is "partisan" or not rarely has anything to do with its merits, and more about where it originates from, and how it's packaged. Just look at those studies when people were asked about "Obamacare" vs "ACA: (the latter has a lot more support, even on the right!). So those razor-thin margins? They're not necessarily because the bill in question is not good. Indeed, the very politicians who vote against it might concede that it's good - in private. But they have elections to win, and voters to rile up to win them. Not to mention that Congress, by design, is not really a good representation of public opinion. In fact, Senate is skewed so badly at this point that it's possible to pass and ratify a constitutional amendment through votes of politicians representing less than 1/4 of the country's population, so long as they're concentrated in the right states.
helen___keller 5y ago
Truthfully, a critical eye at the structure of US government sees an enormously poorly designed system on almost every front except stability. Unfortunately, even if a system could be designed that improves on the failures while maintaining the stability, the US government is so stable that it's nearly impossible to improve (as this requires constitutional amendments, the highest possible hurdle to clear)
aspaceman 5y ago
It's been a slowly developing problem. There's always been riders to important bills, but so little legislation is made by Congress now. The only opportunity to get anything done is one of the few bills they manage to get their shit together and pass. I'd be much more entusiastic about a series of bills. Or a Congress more willing and active about legislation from the liberal-wing. At least that'd fit their marketing better. But the right-wing is incredibly obstructionist. Without serious action the two are just stuck in a staring contest as the judicial and executive suck up all the power and responsibility they leave on the table.
SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
The USA may take the concept of "collection of laws bundled together" a bit too far for comfort, but such concept implemented with more moderation is a good one, I may even say a necessary one. Laws often have dependencies between them, a change in one "concern" may affect another negatively, or may simply not bring the desired good without changes to the other one. So it makes sense to bundle such concerns into a all or nothing deal. A simple example would be a bill to build a shipping port in a remote location being bundled with a bill to build a railway and a roadway to said remote location; if one is passed without the other you end up with a useless port or a useless road/railroad.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > Laws often have dependencies between them, a change in one "concern" may affect another negatively, or may simply not bring the desired good without changes to the other one. Laws are software and should be written and managed like that.
  - hallway_monitor 5y ago
    Exactly this. Laws are the operating system in fact.
rsj_hn 5y ago
> it's preposterously stupid that our legal system So at this point, your Chesterton fence alarm should be blazing red, because it is unlikely that you, sitting in pure contemplation, can correctly decide that something so widespread and stable across centuries is "preposterously stupid". So let's try to understand why this is necessary. To start, we do not live in a democracy, we live in a system where large majorities are needed for something to pass. Democracy is three wolves and two sheep voting on who to have for dinner. It scares the hell out of people, and rightly so. To defend against this, we institute a number of undemocratic consensus requirements that effectively boil down to large supermajorities being needed in order to get a law passed. This, by the way, is why people are so confused that Biden can't get his infrastructure bill passed even though he has that oh-so-sexy 2 seat margin in the house and a 50-50 senate. Now imagine you are a team leader with 10 reports, and you are evaluating some course of action, and 6 people feel strongly that option A is the way to go, but 4 people feel strongly that A is a menace and the opposite of A is the correct approach. Do you go ahead and do A, because 6 is a bigger number than 4? If you do, you are a fool, because you tore your team apart, four people may leave, and you are screwed. You need to govern by consensus, and that means: 1. Abandon option A and find another option, A' that a large majority (8 out of 10) can support. This, of course is the ideal solution. A majority so large that the remaining holdouts feel like assholes for pressing the issue. 2. Come up with a mix, where you do A but also B, where the group that hates A loves B, and is willing to trade doing A for getting B. And the group that love A doesn't like B so much, but is willing to accept B in order to get A. So everyone is a little happy. #1 we can call "find the one pure course of action we all agree on" approach #2 we can call "generate a collective basket of actions that, together, we can all agree on". And very little introspection should tell you that option 1 is almost never available, but option 2 is virtually always available. So one senator gets more grain subsidies, and in exchange he's willing to tolerate removal of a tax deduction and the subsidy of some solar panels, and another senator hates the solar panel subsidy, but loves getting rid of the tax deduction more, and doesn't much care about the grain subsidy, and the third senator hates getting rid of the tax deduction but loves the grain and solar subsidies more. Thus there is a policy mix where all of them can agree, even though on each specific policy there is no consensus. This magic by which the sum of policies is able to achieve consensus while each individual policy is not really confuses people who don't understand convex preferences. They think preferences should be linear, not convex. Some even have bizarre moral beliefs about this, which is truly a WTF situation, but that's where we are, people get outraged about literally everything, including convex preferences. You may have noticed that this basket approach is very reminiscent of the gains from trade you learned in your econ 101 class, and you'd be correct -- this consensus formation is even called "horse trading". Thus welfare maximization via convex preferences is the process by which a super-majority agreement is reached when there is no one pure action that we all agree on, allowing government to continue while protecting us from the tyranny of majority rules. The only thing "preposterously stupid" is the shallow dismissal of this consensus formation, seeing as how it is the bedrock that allows consensus to be reached in any group situation, from being an engineering team lead to running a local Kiwanas club to running congress. Next time you face a divided membership in whatever team you are leading, start some creative horse trading -- there is a good chance you will be able to reach consensus.

breadzeppelin__ 5y ago

I often try to think of a rule that would require simplified bills without just having arbitrary limits. Like, wouldn't it be nice if each thing voted on had to be less than 8 pages (for example) in length instead of 3000. I'm sure there is some downside though like how will we fit all the pork in to this vote??!?

louloulou 5y ago
It should be +1 day per page before it can be voted on. It's completely absurd that the people voting on these bills don't have the chance to read and understand them before having to give an opinion and change the laws governing >300M people. The whole thing makes a mockery of representative democracy.
- koolba 5y ago
  And +1 day per X% of GDP being spent would be nice too.
  - louloulou 5y ago
    And a max number of pages per day limit
- idrios 5y ago
  Instead of 1 bill with 3000 pages, you'd have 3000 bills that are each 1 page. Frankly, that's a great outcome and this a great idea.
KMag 5y ago
Not just pork, but also more productive forms of legislative compromise would be affected by such limitations.
- breadzeppelin__ 5y ago
  yea that makes sense. That's why I always wonder if there's a GOOD way to force simplification

snarf21 5y ago

It is the nature of compromise for 50-60 people. The thing that is more stupid in my mind is that they all only care about getting their pork barrel. I don't understand why some don't revoke their support for things that are too blatant. Unfortunately, our political system is all about money in and kickbacks out. Classic system of misaligned incentives.

Blackthorn 5y ago

This is entirely due to the necessity of 60 votes to pass a normal bill vs 50 for a reconciliation bill.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

landemva 5y ago

If the 'someone' is the person who can veto it, then we should expect that 'someone' to sign it into law. I suppose we get what we allow and what we voted in to office.

UnpossibleJim 5y ago

I mean, if we lived in a reasonable society, riders would be abolished.

CabSauce 5y ago

Unfortunately, anything passed in the senate requires 60 votes or need to be passed during reconcilliation (one bill per year). This is due to the use of the fillibuster to stop anything else from being considered.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

nickff 5y ago

The reason for this is that most legislation wouldn't pass without the amendments; the amendments contain 'pork' and special interest legislation that encourages legislators who are on the fence or even mildly opposed, to vote for the bill. Some of the most well-documented examples of this are the amendments to the ACA (Obamacare), which include the infamous 'corn-husker kickback'.

hallway_monitor 5y ago
Yes everyone knows about that carve out in the ACA. But does everyone know it was removed, allegedly at Nebraska senator Nelson's request, before the legislation went into effect?
- nickff 5y ago
  That one was removed, but a number of others remained: https://www.politico.com/story/2009/12/payoffs-for-states-get-reid-to-60-030815 https://www.politico.com/story/2009/12/payoffs-for-states-ge...
Djrhfbfnsks 5y ago
I don't think it's a bad thing that most current legislation wouldn't pass as-is. If it's not popular enough to reach the required threshold on its own, then it shouldn't become law.

jrochkind1 5y ago

Who _actually_ decides if it gets in the bill, anyway? And who actually writes it? Often industry. In this case maybe law enforcement?

idrios 5y ago

My job complains when I make a pull request that includes more than a few hundred lines of code and tells me to break it up into smaller, more readable changes. But for the US govt a 2700 page bill that congressmen get only a couple of days or hours to review seems to be the norm.

notJim 5y ago
I think there's actually a helpful analogy to software development here. If your company can only release once every 2–8 years, then naturally the releases would become huge. Unfortunately, our government is so bogged down by divisiveness and the filibuster, etc, that is the state we're in. Except in cases of near outright catastrophe, the only substantive thing they can pass is the budget reconciliation bill, which only requires a majority instead of a super-majority. As a result, that bill becomes enormous, just like the software release. As with software, the fix is likely to make it easier to pass more small bills, but the very systems that lead to the current status quo make reforming it nearly impossible.
- nybble41 5y ago
  > Except in cases of near outright catastrophe, the only substantive thing they can pass is the budget reconciliation bill, which only requires a majority instead of a super-majority. The fact that they want to pass bills which only have a bare majority and not a super-majority is a big part of the problem. If you can't get super-majority (or more like near-unanimous) approval for your bill, odds are that it's not good law or something the government ought to be doing. But the focus is always on these huge, controversial proposals with razor-thin margins and getting them passed over the strenuous objection of approximately half of Congress and a large fraction or possibly even a majority of the population at large. In short, the system is utterly broken.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    To be honest, at this point whether some policy is "partisan" or not rarely has anything to do with its merits, and more about where it originates from, and how it's packaged. Just look at those studies when people were asked about "Obamacare" vs "ACA: (the latter has a lot more support, even on the right!). So those razor-thin margins? They're not necessarily because the bill in question is not good. Indeed, the very politicians who vote against it might concede that it's good - in private. But they have elections to win, and voters to rile up to win them. Not to mention that Congress, by design, is not really a good representation of public opinion. In fact, Senate is skewed so badly at this point that it's possible to pass and ratify a constitutional amendment through votes of politicians representing less than 1/4 of the country's population, so long as they're concentrated in the right states.

helen___keller 5y ago

Truthfully, a critical eye at the structure of US government sees an enormously poorly designed system on almost every front except stability. Unfortunately, even if a system could be designed that improves on the failures while maintaining the stability, the US government is so stable that it's nearly impossible to improve (as this requires constitutional amendments, the highest possible hurdle to clear)

aspaceman 5y ago

It's been a slowly developing problem. There's always been riders to important bills, but so little legislation is made by Congress now. The only opportunity to get anything done is one of the few bills they manage to get their shit together and pass. I'd be much more entusiastic about a series of bills. Or a Congress more willing and active about legislation from the liberal-wing. At least that'd fit their marketing better. But the right-wing is incredibly obstructionist. Without serious action the two are just stuck in a staring contest as the judicial and executive suck up all the power and responsibility they leave on the table.

SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago

The USA may take the concept of "collection of laws bundled together" a bit too far for comfort, but such concept implemented with more moderation is a good one, I may even say a necessary one. Laws often have dependencies between them, a change in one "concern" may affect another negatively, or may simply not bring the desired good without changes to the other one. So it makes sense to bundle such concerns into a all or nothing deal. A simple example would be a bill to build a shipping port in a remote location being bundled with a bill to build a railway and a roadway to said remote location; if one is passed without the other you end up with a useless port or a useless road/railroad.

rbanffy 5y ago
> Laws often have dependencies between them, a change in one "concern" may affect another negatively, or may simply not bring the desired good without changes to the other one. Laws are software and should be written and managed like that.
- hallway_monitor 5y ago
  Exactly this. Laws are the operating system in fact.

rsj_hn 5y ago

> it's preposterously stupid that our legal system So at this point, your Chesterton fence alarm should be blazing red, because it is unlikely that you, sitting in pure contemplation, can correctly decide that something so widespread and stable across centuries is "preposterously stupid". So let's try to understand why this is necessary. To start, we do not live in a democracy, we live in a system where large majorities are needed for something to pass. Democracy is three wolves and two sheep voting on who to have for dinner. It scares the hell out of people, and rightly so. To defend against this, we institute a number of undemocratic consensus requirements that effectively boil down to large supermajorities being needed in order to get a law passed. This, by the way, is why people are so confused that Biden can't get his infrastructure bill passed even though he has that oh-so-sexy 2 seat margin in the house and a 50-50 senate. Now imagine you are a team leader with 10 reports, and you are evaluating some course of action, and 6 people feel strongly that option A is the way to go, but 4 people feel strongly that A is a menace and the opposite of A is the correct approach. Do you go ahead and do A, because 6 is a bigger number than 4? If you do, you are a fool, because you tore your team apart, four people may leave, and you are screwed. You need to govern by consensus, and that means: 1. Abandon option A and find another option, A' that a large majority (8 out of 10) can support. This, of course is the ideal solution. A majority so large that the remaining holdouts feel like assholes for pressing the issue. 2. Come up with a mix, where you do A but also B, where the group that hates A loves B, and is willing to trade doing A for getting B. And the group that love A doesn't like B so much, but is willing to accept B in order to get A. So everyone is a little happy. #1 we can call "find the one pure course of action we all agree on" approach #2 we can call "generate a collective basket of actions that, together, we can all agree on". And very little introspection should tell you that option 1 is almost never available, but option 2 is virtually always available. So one senator gets more grain subsidies, and in exchange he's willing to tolerate removal of a tax deduction and the subsidy of some solar panels, and another senator hates the solar panel subsidy, but loves getting rid of the tax deduction more, and doesn't much care about the grain subsidy, and the third senator hates getting rid of the tax deduction but loves the grain and solar subsidies more. Thus there is a policy mix where all of them can agree, even though on each specific policy there is no consensus. This magic by which the sum of policies is able to achieve consensus while each individual policy is not really confuses people who don't understand convex preferences. They think preferences should be linear, not convex. Some even have bizarre moral beliefs about this, which is truly a WTF situation, but that's where we are, people get outraged about literally everything, including convex preferences. You may have noticed that this basket approach is very reminiscent of the gains from trade you learned in your econ 101 class, and you'd be correct -- this consensus formation is even called "horse trading". Thus welfare maximization via convex preferences is the process by which a super-majority agreement is reached when there is no one pure action that we all agree on, allowing government to continue while protecting us from the tyranny of majority rules. The only thing "preposterously stupid" is the shallow dismissal of this consensus formation, seeing as how it is the bedrock that allows consensus to be reached in any group situation, from being an engineering team lead to running a local Kiwanas club to running congress. Next time you face a divided membership in whatever team you are leading, start some creative horse trading -- there is a good chance you will be able to reach consensus.