4 ms·
There should be a law that prevents bills that get shot down from being reintroduced in X years, and also to disallow the same person/group/party from reintrodu
by chii 4y ago
There should be a law that prevents bills that get shot down from being reintroduced in X years, and also to disallow the same person/group/party from reintroducing it (i.e., it has to come from another person/party).
Like double jeopardy style.
- lnxg33k1 4y agoI agree with the same person but not with forbidding to reintroduce it after X years, society changes, situations change, but I think there should be at least 10-15 years between each presentation
- jltsiren 4y agoOne of the fundamental principles of democracy is that citizens have the right to change their minds. Whatever the previous congress did, it should not bind the hands of the next congress after the elections. If something failed to pass, it is possible that the citizens took that into account when they voted, and the new congress is willing to pass the same bill.
- Dylan16807 4y agoSo, every six years considering this is the senate? That wouldn't be nearly as obnoxious as the current pace on this bill.
- sokoloff 4y agoThe Senate makeup changes every 2 years, even though an individual Senator’s term is 6.
- amelius 4y agoPerhaps we should have elections every week then. Because the public can also change their mind.
- herbst 4y agoThat's basically what we do in Switzerland. Yet such bills don't just pop up again completely unmodified.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoAlso, any bill should be required to fit on a A4 paper. There is no democratic process possible with bills taking hundreds or thousands of pages. One more proof that we are living in (very free) oligarchic systems that think themself to be democracies.
- ed_balls 4y agonew group of people vote on it. I think the same rule is in many places e.g. Brexit didn't go to vote for the second time.
- fardo 4y agoToo exploitable in two ways: First failure mode is that the metric for two bills being “the same” will be too narrow, in which case the rule will be ineffective due to legislators playing with the punctuation or paragraph structure, or Second failure mode is that the rule will be too broad and this becomes a weapon which would increase gridlock even further. By providing parties and non-majority fringe groups within them the option to “damn bills by weak praise” into the future, legislators working adversarially could propose a bill they don’t want to pass, veto it, argue any successor bills are “the same bill”, and now, they’ve effectively enshrined the state of the issue for the next X years.
- dspillett 4y agoThird failure mode: a party in power with a strong majority now but losing the lead rapidly, could scupper a near future opposition in power by raising motions the other side(s) might like to enact and voting them down to hell, so the forced delay means they are stuck or have to be watered down to work around the delay rule.
- hhjinks 4y agoThat's just a more specific version of the second failure mode.
- terafo 4y agoHow do you determine that this is the same bill? Like they can rename it and rewrite it. And can put it into huge omnibus bill like inflation reduction act.
- kevviiinn 4y agoThey haven't even renamed it afaik
- cwillu 4y agoNoted abolitionist William Wilberforce would like a word.
- triceratops 4y agoSlavery in the US was not ultimately abolished by law. I mean it technically was, but only after a bloody war that removed opponents of abolition from positions of power until the laws could be updated.
- tjpnz 4y agoThey should EARN the right to have their bullshit laws debated.
- croes 4y agoSo good bills could be killed more easily?
- BoxOfRain 4y agoI quite like the mirror image of this too, all laws that are actually passed have a built-in expiry date of 25-30 years at the maximum so each generation is forced to re-debate them and see if they're still relevant.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoI am not so sure, that is a good idea, especially with the filibuster in the Senate. For example, I don’t know if the Civil Rights Act would be renewed in this political environment. Same with the Endangered Species act and various other environmental legislation.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- j16sdiz 4y agoThis could backfire. Introduce a bill that everybody wants with some evil details here or there. Bill get rejected, and you can't introduct similar bill again.