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Lawmakers should spend as much time getting rid of laws as they do creating them.
by brink 3y ago
Lawmakers should spend as much time getting rid of laws as they do creating them.
- lockhouse 3y agoBetter yet, every law should have an expiration date that must be explicitly renewed.
- comte7092 3y agoThink that through for a second. The Oregon legislature only meets for 6 months in odd numbered years and a month and a half in even years. In that time they barely have time to address pressing issues of the day, do we really need them to be rubber stamping a bunch of laws for weeks every time? It’s a terrible idea.
- krisoft 3y ago> The Oregon legislature only meets for 6 months in odd numbered years and a month and a half in even years. You are saying that as if that is some in-mutable fact of life. I work the whole year. Odd and even years included. Why don't they? > do we really need them to be rubber stamping a bunch of laws for weeks every time? Maybe they will think harder about how to achieve the same level of service with less and better laws then.
- comte7092 3y agoWhy do you think less laws are magically better? Assuming you’re a programmer, why don’t you just write fewer lines of code? Maybe we should just have every line of code automatically delete itself after a specified period of time.
- lockhouse 3y agoIf a law has been effective and is still relevant it should be easy to get it renewed. Lines of code is actually a great analogy. The Linux kernel frequently removes old, irrelevant code that is poorly maintained and is no longer useful.
- lozenge 3y agoIn my experience, many issues have been caused by removing code based on assumptions it isn't used/has no effect/has been superseded, while there aren't many issues caused by letting dead code hang around a bit.
- comte7092 3y agoOld laws get overwritten, edited, and removed all the time.m, after review and discussion.
- toast0 3y agoI don't know about Oregon's legislature. But other legislatures sometimes have trouble getting any work done, even the easy work. Most likely, they'd just resort to blanket renewing everything, in order to get to the real work, if it were a year that work was doable. And in years where there's no appetite for getting things done, it will probably take the whole session to get the renewals done.
- pseudalopex 3y agoLinux kernel maintainers remove code when convinced it is a good idea. Legislators remove code when convinced it is a good idea. Linux kernel code does not expire. Laws should not expire if the analogy is great.
- some_random 3y agoI mean, I think everyone kinda agrees that in general having less code is better. That said, a better analogy would be to imagine a world in which every program you ever push to prod, every docker container, every EC2 box, all by default were around forever. Making them automatically stop themselves is a way to keep system complexity down and make sure each component is actually, you know, doing something useful.
- comte7092 3y agoI definitely agree that having a simplified legal code is a good thing. What I don’t agree with is the idea that you should just slash away at it with a machete rather than cut away with a scalpel. Making changes to laws is extremely politically fraught and challenging, the real world is messy, and we need laws. For as much flak as people like to give our political system, America has succeeded for having fairly effective and good government, not in spite of it.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoThe law is a monolith. It doesn't work like docker containers. It works like a codebase. If anything it works like a series of patches. Imagine a codebase where each commit has an expiration date. If some patches are left to expire, I think we can would be in agreement that at the very least we would have no expectation that patch application would still be successful - leaving us with textual issues. At the very worst, we have no guarantee that the resulting body of law would be consistent, or result in a consistent society. We already have potential loopholes when folks are careful with drafting laws. This is asking for exploits. There is no static analysis for political economy.
- krisoft 3y ago> Assuming you’re a programmer, why don’t you just write fewer lines of code? Oh I'm working very hard on that. Code is liability. > Maybe we should just have every line of code automatically delete itself after a specified period of time. I actually proposed that. We should just try to randomly delete lines of code and if it doesn't break any tests just commit it. And I was only half joking.
- denlekke 3y agoi just read the wiki and apparently it's considered a Citizen Legislature and is a part time job, with corresponding pay and most people have another job i imagine the original goal was to have "regular people" vs "career politicians" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Legislative_Assembly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Legislative_Assembly
- comte7092 3y agoThis. The even numbered year session was added relatively recently (i.e. within the last 20 years.) And the minority party still complains when major when major work is done during that period of time, because “that’s not what it is for”.
- no_wizard 3y agoHas it made it so "regular people" can afford to run for office though? In practice I don't think it works the way its being presented like this. You still need to be wealthy enough to kick off a campaign, raise awareness for running for office etc. I don't think this has meaningfully made the Oregon legislature more representative of the "average" person
- sidewndr46 3y agoBecause they have to campaign the rest of the time?
- comte7092 3y agoState legislators spend relatively little time campaigning. From anecdotal experience most people don’t even know who they are or what they do.
- imgabe 3y agoMaybe they could meet more often? What are they doing the rest of the time?
- comte7092 3y agoIt’s not up to them, it’s what the Oregon constitution prescribes.
- imgabe 3y agoThen amend the constitution. Maybe it made sense when representatives had to travel to the capital by horse and buggy, but it's 2023 now. There's no reason to have such a restriction.
- ghaff 3y agoThey're probably working another job given they're paid $33K/year. A lot of state and local political positions don't pay much.
- philwelch 3y agoSet the laws to expire in ten years, offset in tranches two years apart, so the legislature only needs to renew 1/5 of the laws every other year. If that isn't manageable, maybe there are too many laws!
- comte7092 3y agoGovernance is complicated.
- philwelch 3y agoThe idea is to reduce complexity by stopping the tendency of laws to accumulate. If 10 year sunsets are too aggressive, maybe try 20 year sunsets instead. Most legislation is amendment and revision of existing law anyway, so it wouldn’t necessarily hurt to make the legislature consciously review existing law on a regular cadence. And if someone gets a bug up their ass about legalizing self-serve gasoline, that would just reset the sunset clause on the gas station laws and not have to worry about it again for a decade or two.
- caturopath 3y agoHell if I know. Work will fill whatever's allotted to it. Is 6/1.5/6/1.5... "enough" for what they should be doing now or "enough" to do what they should be doing in a world where all laws sunset? How would I know from looking at the number of months they're in session? If they only met 1.5 months every year, would it be obvious to you that they didn't have enough time to "address pressing issues of the day"? If they met 6 months every year, would it seem to you like they must be spinning their wheels a bit?
- comte7092 3y agoTake some time and learn what it takes to conduct legislative activities. This comment reads similar to people saying “why does it take so long to add a button to a website! It seems so simple to me I don’t know why you’re just wasting your time! What do we even pay you for?”
- caturopath 3y agoI didn't say that it seemed like too much time, I questioned that it was clearly the exact right right amount of time, saying equally as much about the potential of needing more time than less.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoThe Nevada legislature beats that. It's limited to 120 days and meets every other year
- ellisv 3y agoI like the spirit of this idea – to remove outdated and unenforceable laws from the books – but I think this is unpractical at most levels of government. I also think legislative bodies would adopt work arounds that would nullify the desired effect.
- altacc 3y agoI wouldn't trust politicians at all with this. They purposefully stalemate laws that are needed to use a bargaining chips or attach irrelevant but self-serving amendments. The midnight vote to keep murder a crime will also fund a nuclear waste plant in Ohio and a pig jacuzzi in Kentucky! It would be better to vote for better politicians who work together to enact sensible, reasonable and evidence based policies but that'll never happen, because humans.
- lockhouse 3y agoWe could use more compromise in our legislatures. The current system of ramming through your party’s agenda before the next election takes away your majority is terrible.
- anon291 3y agoThis is Oregon. The democrat majority is not going away.
- philwelch 3y ago> attach irrelevant but self-serving amendments A lot of state constitutions have single subject rules prohibiting this.
- yboris 3y agoI've heard of something called sunset clause which can be included in laws that make them expire if some condition is (not) met. For example, if the goal of the law is to lower incidence of crime X and if crime X has not decreased by 10% by Jan 1st, 2026 the law automatically is voided.
- Auracle 3y agoI’ve thought there should be a period of time - maybe 30 years or so, where every law needs to be renewed or thrown out. I’d assume a committee would take years to do this. I’m sure most would just be put right back through, but politicians would probably be wary of effectively signing on to the worst stuff again.
- quantified 3y agoThey'l just set the expiration date for the year 3000.
- moffkalast 3y agoGood news everyone!
- shagie 3y agohttps://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_811.315 https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_811.315 ORS 811.315 Failure of slow driver to drive on right A person commits the offense of failure of a slow driver to drive on the right if the person is operating a vehicle upon a roadway at less than the normal speed of traffic at the time and place and under the conditions then existing and the person fails to drive: --- So, when does this law expire and need to be renewed? If it was to expire and needed to be renewed, would it get a meaningful review as part of the renewal process? How long would it take to go through https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_chapter_811 https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_chapter_811 to renew each one? ... and then going up one level https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_title_59 https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_title_59 If some individuals were protesting big government and refused to show up to establish quorum in a timely manner, would that result in there being no laws for the road? ... and would that be seen as a good thing?
- suby 3y agoWe're never going to get universal healthcare with such a law. I'd wager that almost all welfare is as good as dead in fact.
- moffkalast 3y agoAh you're thinking too small, if both major parties filibuster each other's law renewals then in a short while there will be no laws at all after they all expire. The libertarian dream I guess.
- morgannewman 3y ago[dead]
- baggy_trough 3y agoLawmakers should spend much more time getting rid of laws than creating them.
- anon291 3y agoHonestly I love not having to get out in the rain to pump my gas.
- nichos 3y agoI don't think I've seen a car wash thay didn't have a roof over the pumps.