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Honest question: How do you square a legislative failure to be specific with Gorsuch lambasting the length of most modern laws? Recent court opinions seem to

by prpl 2y ago

Honest question: How do you square a legislative failure to be specific with Gorsuch lambasting the length of most modern laws? Recent court opinions seem to take the stance that congress hasn’t legislated thoroughly and accurately, and now have crippled the chevron doctrine saying it should be in their hands. There’s parallels here with software development, I think. It’s easy to come up with a basic system that works as intended but is not robust to failure. It’s extremely hard to near impossible to be both succinct, correct, and robust to failure. You also wouldn’t expect the PMs to be responsible for the implementation. Of course, many lawmakers are happy to outsource the coding to special interests.

delichon 2y ago
> How do you square a legislative failure to be specific with Gorsuch lambasting the length of most modern laws? Specificity plus brevity plus non-delegation add up to a limit on the load of law that we are subjected to. It's the bias toward freedom of individual action of classical liberalism. You are entirely correct that this kind of limitation would be crippling to a software project. Gorsuch just doesn't think that the state should have that degree of detailed control.
- alan-hn 2y ago
  Then you get loopholes being abused
  - prpl 2y ago
    And conveniently, court cases that will inevitably be appealed to a supreme court. The ambiguity, of course shifts the power to the courts to resolve.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  The Bill of Rights is a specific list of things that government cannot do. It's been under constant assault ever since. Something to keep in mind when thinking about Chevron. Consider the 2nd Amendment. I'm not a gun nut, and in the abstract don't care much if gun ownership was banned. However, that would require simply ignoring the 2nd Amendment. If the 2nd can be ignored, ignoring the rest cannot be far behind. When you let a tiger into your house to get rid of the dog, the tiger won't stop there.
  - RandomThoughts3 2y ago
    The position is weird to this European. A constitution is not a sacred text but a very practical one. The constitution of my country went trough five major rewrites and was amended approximately a dozen of times since the last rewrite and somehow we are still a liberal free country. The idea that touching it in any way or form is a slippery slop leading to less rights is a fallacy.
    - drdeca 2y ago
      It isn’t that “touching it” is a slippery slope, but that ignoring part of it is a slippery slope. If an amendment is passed to change the 2nd amendment, that’s one thing. But not doing that, and just banning private gun ownership (or whatever law one might want to pass that goes against the second amendment) anyway, would be a rather different thing.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      The Constitution isn't meant to be immutable, the Constitution itself specifies a process for changing the Constitution. That process has been used numerous times before, so we know it can work. The people who want to ignore that process are people who want to change something in the Constitution but lack the requisite political support to do it properly. This is why they get told off. The Second Ammendment could be nullified with a new Amendment that undoes the Second, but this isn't seriously entertained by gun control activists in America because it would be extremely unpopular so there's no way they could pull it off. Instead, they intend to simply ignore the law.
      - RandomThoughts3 2y ago
        Sure but the explanation conveniently sidesteps the issue with the senate lack of actual representativity. Even a popular law could easily be blocked by a small minority in the rural states. Anyway I’m not American. The quality or lack thereof of the US political system doesn’t really affect me. Would appreciate the US getting its act together when it comes to GHG emission however because we share the same planet.
- sirspacey 2y ago
  Most laws are written in response to harm. The goal is to prevent the harm, but how to achieve the goal is not something you can encode into law in some kind of recursive function. Context matters.
nradov 2y ago
One option would be to just have fewer federal laws altogether, and devolve most authority back to the several states. The federal government was only able to assume many of it's current powers due to a series of Supreme Court decisions that allowed Congress to use the Commerce Clause to legislate on issues only loosely connected to interstate commerce. Those precedents can be overturned. Decentralized, peer-to-peer systems tend to be pretty robust. Even if a few states "fail" the others will be fine.
- ArtB 2y ago
  1) how would states rights prevent the tragedy of the commons? CO2 emissions surely apply. You would need to have state-level tarrifs for bad actors. 2)If you move it to the state-level how does that simplify the statutes?
  - stogot 2y ago
    The previous poster is right that the commerce clause (amongst others) have been twisted incomprehsnibly and while there’s a benefit, it’s begging to be overturned (and in a ‘realist’ sense, they should be). The answer then is for an amendment to provide the (expected) additional powers to the federal government.
    - wildzzz 2y ago
      And then we end up in the same situation where there's some new thing that should probably be regulated at the federal level but can't be since it's not explicitly listed in the constitution. Imagine one day we invent portable teleporters. They would immediately be used for crime once they are available on the market although there would certainly be plenty of legal uses. That sounds like something the federal government should regulate, yes? You simply can't leave that up to the states because everyone is going to have a different standard for who can own one such that all you would need to do is travel to the least regulated state, buy a teleporter, and teleport back home. Having 50 different laws saying who can and can't own one would simply not be feasible based on how easy people can travel across the country. The federal government would need to establish regulations but only if the constitution says they can. Congress in 2024 would not have any notion that those could exist and would likely not explicitly give the federal government the power to regular them.
akira2501 2y ago
> extremely hard to near impossible to be both succinct, correct, and robust to failure. It depends on the size of the overall system. The smaller the system the easier this is to achieve. > many lawmakers are happy to outsource the coding to special interests. In and of itself, this is actually a good thing, as you point out: > You also wouldn’t expect the PMs to be responsible for the implementation. So what you really want is two third parties. One to write. The other to review. Which, we have, in that the President is entitled to veto any legislation that hasn't passed with a super majority.
- autoexec 2y ago
  > So what you really want is two third parties. One to write. The other to review. Which, we have, in that the President is entitled to veto I think what you would want are non-bribed congressmen writing laws for the good of the people and not to increase the wealth and power of a select few at the people's expense, while those laws are being informed/reviewed by experts who don't have a conflict of interest (which should include not accepting money/favors from people who do) and then having a President (who should also not be accepting bribes) able to veto laws. Having corporations and lobbyists hired by industry write laws that favor them to the detriment of everyone else, then getting those same laws passed thanks to a series of dark money bribes and promises, then having a similarly bribed president rubber stamp those laws is what brought us to where we are right now. If our current system is working as intended, then the system has failed by design and needs adjusting. If it isn't working as intended and private corporations were never supposed to be able to have this level of influence over government or have the ability to cause harm to the degree that they have, then the system still needs adjusting to correct the situation.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    > while those laws are being informed/reviewed by experts who don't have a conflict of interest How do you create this rather mythical class of individual? Wouldn't the time taken to gain the expertise also subject them to bias from the companies they worked for? We can put time limits on the "revolving door" but you're essentially building a policy that actually relies on it. > lobbyists hired by industry When an industry is not monopolized and has healthy competition why would you expect the industry, possibly represented by a trade group, to be incapable of writing good long term policy? How do you account for the many times where this has actually happened and continues to happen? There is a monopolization problem in many industries. This gives a single corporate entity massive power. Perhaps more power than the federal government itself. Isn't this what "too big to fail" or "too big to disband" represents? Hasn't it been shown that actual legislation is meaningless to these entities already? > is what brought us to where we are right now. Where did you think we were before? > then the system still needs adjusting to correct the situation. If laws aren't being enforced already how is modifying the system for writing them possibly going to solve your apparent complaints?

by prpl 2y ago

delichon 2y ago

> How do you square a legislative failure to be specific with Gorsuch lambasting the length of most modern laws? Specificity plus brevity plus non-delegation add up to a limit on the load of law that we are subjected to. It's the bias toward freedom of individual action of classical liberalism. You are entirely correct that this kind of limitation would be crippling to a software project. Gorsuch just doesn't think that the state should have that degree of detailed control.

alan-hn 2y ago
Then you get loopholes being abused
- prpl 2y ago
  And conveniently, court cases that will inevitably be appealed to a supreme court. The ambiguity, of course shifts the power to the courts to resolve.
WalterBright 2y ago
The Bill of Rights is a specific list of things that government cannot do. It's been under constant assault ever since. Something to keep in mind when thinking about Chevron. Consider the 2nd Amendment. I'm not a gun nut, and in the abstract don't care much if gun ownership was banned. However, that would require simply ignoring the 2nd Amendment. If the 2nd can be ignored, ignoring the rest cannot be far behind. When you let a tiger into your house to get rid of the dog, the tiger won't stop there.
- RandomThoughts3 2y ago
  The position is weird to this European. A constitution is not a sacred text but a very practical one. The constitution of my country went trough five major rewrites and was amended approximately a dozen of times since the last rewrite and somehow we are still a liberal free country. The idea that touching it in any way or form is a slippery slop leading to less rights is a fallacy.
  - drdeca 2y ago
    It isn’t that “touching it” is a slippery slope, but that ignoring part of it is a slippery slope. If an amendment is passed to change the 2nd amendment, that’s one thing. But not doing that, and just banning private gun ownership (or whatever law one might want to pass that goes against the second amendment) anyway, would be a rather different thing.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    The Constitution isn't meant to be immutable, the Constitution itself specifies a process for changing the Constitution. That process has been used numerous times before, so we know it can work. The people who want to ignore that process are people who want to change something in the Constitution but lack the requisite political support to do it properly. This is why they get told off. The Second Ammendment could be nullified with a new Amendment that undoes the Second, but this isn't seriously entertained by gun control activists in America because it would be extremely unpopular so there's no way they could pull it off. Instead, they intend to simply ignore the law.
    - RandomThoughts3 2y ago
      Sure but the explanation conveniently sidesteps the issue with the senate lack of actual representativity. Even a popular law could easily be blocked by a small minority in the rural states. Anyway I’m not American. The quality or lack thereof of the US political system doesn’t really affect me. Would appreciate the US getting its act together when it comes to GHG emission however because we share the same planet.
sirspacey 2y ago
Most laws are written in response to harm. The goal is to prevent the harm, but how to achieve the goal is not something you can encode into law in some kind of recursive function. Context matters.

nradov 2y ago

One option would be to just have fewer federal laws altogether, and devolve most authority back to the several states. The federal government was only able to assume many of it's current powers due to a series of Supreme Court decisions that allowed Congress to use the Commerce Clause to legislate on issues only loosely connected to interstate commerce. Those precedents can be overturned. Decentralized, peer-to-peer systems tend to be pretty robust. Even if a few states "fail" the others will be fine.

ArtB 2y ago
1) how would states rights prevent the tragedy of the commons? CO2 emissions surely apply. You would need to have state-level tarrifs for bad actors. 2)If you move it to the state-level how does that simplify the statutes?
- stogot 2y ago
  The previous poster is right that the commerce clause (amongst others) have been twisted incomprehsnibly and while there’s a benefit, it’s begging to be overturned (and in a ‘realist’ sense, they should be). The answer then is for an amendment to provide the (expected) additional powers to the federal government.
  - wildzzz 2y ago
    And then we end up in the same situation where there's some new thing that should probably be regulated at the federal level but can't be since it's not explicitly listed in the constitution. Imagine one day we invent portable teleporters. They would immediately be used for crime once they are available on the market although there would certainly be plenty of legal uses. That sounds like something the federal government should regulate, yes? You simply can't leave that up to the states because everyone is going to have a different standard for who can own one such that all you would need to do is travel to the least regulated state, buy a teleporter, and teleport back home. Having 50 different laws saying who can and can't own one would simply not be feasible based on how easy people can travel across the country. The federal government would need to establish regulations but only if the constitution says they can. Congress in 2024 would not have any notion that those could exist and would likely not explicitly give the federal government the power to regular them.

akira2501 2y ago

> extremely hard to near impossible to be both succinct, correct, and robust to failure. It depends on the size of the overall system. The smaller the system the easier this is to achieve. > many lawmakers are happy to outsource the coding to special interests. In and of itself, this is actually a good thing, as you point out: > You also wouldn’t expect the PMs to be responsible for the implementation. So what you really want is two third parties. One to write. The other to review. Which, we have, in that the President is entitled to veto any legislation that hasn't passed with a super majority.

autoexec 2y ago
> So what you really want is two third parties. One to write. The other to review. Which, we have, in that the President is entitled to veto I think what you would want are non-bribed congressmen writing laws for the good of the people and not to increase the wealth and power of a select few at the people's expense, while those laws are being informed/reviewed by experts who don't have a conflict of interest (which should include not accepting money/favors from people who do) and then having a President (who should also not be accepting bribes) able to veto laws. Having corporations and lobbyists hired by industry write laws that favor them to the detriment of everyone else, then getting those same laws passed thanks to a series of dark money bribes and promises, then having a similarly bribed president rubber stamp those laws is what brought us to where we are right now. If our current system is working as intended, then the system has failed by design and needs adjusting. If it isn't working as intended and private corporations were never supposed to be able to have this level of influence over government or have the ability to cause harm to the degree that they have, then the system still needs adjusting to correct the situation.
- akira2501 2y ago
  > while those laws are being informed/reviewed by experts who don't have a conflict of interest How do you create this rather mythical class of individual? Wouldn't the time taken to gain the expertise also subject them to bias from the companies they worked for? We can put time limits on the "revolving door" but you're essentially building a policy that actually relies on it. > lobbyists hired by industry When an industry is not monopolized and has healthy competition why would you expect the industry, possibly represented by a trade group, to be incapable of writing good long term policy? How do you account for the many times where this has actually happened and continues to happen? There is a monopolization problem in many industries. This gives a single corporate entity massive power. Perhaps more power than the federal government itself. Isn't this what "too big to fail" or "too big to disband" represents? Hasn't it been shown that actual legislation is meaningless to these entities already? > is what brought us to where we are right now. Where did you think we were before? > then the system still needs adjusting to correct the situation. If laws aren't being enforced already how is modifying the system for writing them possibly going to solve your apparent complaints?