5 ms·

The problem is that "the authoritarians" (read: almost every politician at every level of government, but a drastically increasing percentage the higher you go)

by pc86 3mo ago

The problem is that "the authoritarians" (read: almost every politician at every level of government, but a drastically increasing percentage the higher you go) only need to get something passed once then it is there forever. Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing.

intrasight 3mo ago
That would indeed solve many problems. It would also focus legislative minds now and in the future. Not sure it would be beneficial for the judicial branch. Also beneficial perhaps would be to have it be necessary that the law spells out the technical implementation. Sort of like patents do.
goalieca 3mo ago
I remember the patriot act.
- pc86 3mo ago
  In this very comment I started talking about the patriot act two or three times but kept deleting it because I didn't want to ramble. But yeah that's exactly what I was thinking of - for people who care about privacy and freedom it was really one of the worst pieces of legislation in modern US history, and permanently changed the country for the worse.
- hvs 3mo ago
  The Patriot Act is perfect example of the adage, "Never let a crisis go to waste."
  - wartywhoa23 3mo ago
    Or rather "Always construct crises proportionate to the desired delta of the current Overton window's position".
    - pc86 3mo ago
      Ah yes, that old adage :)
abecedarius 3mo ago
Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention: > I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it? https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress
- TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
  Add money to politics - more accurately add even more money to politics - and see how this works out.
  - abecedarius 3mo ago
    Concentrated interests want legislation favoring them at the expense of the easily-misled public. So what's your model by which repeal becoming less near-impossible makes the net damage from this dynamic greater.
- afiori 3mo ago
  This looks like something only a libertarian would like
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3mo ago
  >Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention: There's an interesting, one-time shakeup that we could actually accomplish. While it's true that there will never again be another constitutional amendment... there's already one out there that will never expire, partially ratified. Completely beyond Congress's ability to rescind it or cockblock it. Article the First. Were it to be ratified, nearly immediately (whenever the next Census is), the House of Representatives has over 6000 seats. So many that the existing party apparatus wouldn't be able to vet candidates or manipulate. Lobbyists, even, would have a hard time allotting the slush funds to bribe them all. And what would it take to do all of this? Maybe 10 or 12 people hammering (gently) on some state legislator in Nevada or Kansas. Convince him or her to pass the resolution to ratify. Nothing more than that. A single state even attempting to ratify it would start the ball rolling, and no one would be able to stop it.
thesz 3mo ago
> Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing. Then you will have a lot of Constitution amendments. That's first. The burden of ever-changing law landscape will be carried by ordinary people, not by legislators. That's second.
- pc86 3mo ago
  > Then you will have a lot of Constitution amendments. You say that like it's a bad thing? > The burden of ever-changing law landscape will be carried by ordinary people, not by legislators. The "burden" would also include, for the most part, being able to look up at any given point in time whether something violated the law without referring to hundreds of thousands of pages of other codes, administrative law, and agency rules.
  - thesz 3mo ago
    > You say that like it's a bad thing? I am saying that politicians will get around the sunsetting rule, if any, that's first. Constitution, then, will serve as what regular law does right now, without anything that makes something Constitution. That's second. I also am strongly suspecting that hundredths of thousands of pages of codes and laws will not get leaner at all. There is no point in ceding regulatory capture, because the capability to capture regulations is the point of governance, as I see it.
flumes_whims_ 3mo ago
In the saga period of Iceland, 1/3rd of the laws had to be recited orally each year in a public assembly. If we had something like that then our legal code would be a lot slimmer.
- mycall 3mo ago
  Slim is not always better once people find exploits and loopholes which helps them but hurts society at large. Sunsetting is better.
  - sylos 3mo ago
    But clearly what's going on now with omnibus bills that no one has read in its entirety are ok?
Terr_ 3mo ago
> automatic sunset period That's attacking the symptom rather than the cause. The deeper issue is that the legislature is not responsive to the people who don't actually want X anymore. Instead, how about: 1. Replace plurality votes and single-primaries with some form of ranked-choice voting. This reduces the spoiler effect and makes it easier for people to organize around their real priorities. 2. Remove the hard-cap on the House of Representatives, peg it to a number of constituents, and let them meet and vote virtually. 3. Instead of a single "winner takes all" for one region (much smaller regions, if the House is uncapped) allow multiple proportional winners for a moderate region. 4. It's not possible to amend how the Senate seats are per-state, but we can at least make it easier for large States to fission if they decide those rules are screwing over their residents. (Subject to conditions conditions I won't bore you with here. Yet.)
krferriter 3mo ago
> Every law should have The problem is that there isn't really this clean discrete sense of 'a law'. There is the federal code, and the federal register, and bills or rules enacted over time which amend those things. Often times those bills are collections of amendments which do things like add a phrase or swap out a word or add a bullet point to a list. They're like diffs. You can't just have those things sunset individually or you end up with a incoherent code and you end up creating a state of the code which is not what was intended by anyone, at any point along the way. And these can be significant things, like a substantial bill which makes a significant change to federal law may be just like adding a bullet point to a couple lists, or adding a parenthetical to a paragraph. If you make it so all of the federal code and register has to be voted on every 1-10 years, then you'll just make it so everyone always votes to pass all of it, because no one is sitting down and reading all of it, because almost no one even sits down to read all the bills proposed in a year, which are much smaller in text volume. The real underlying problem is that legislators are not responsive to the demands of their constituents. Ideas which have supermajority support among the public are not valued or prioritized. And none of the legislators suffer for it, because the elections are not generally competitive among candidates who understand policymaking, and there is a strong incumbency bias where people just vote for the person they recognize as long as they don't have major complaints and as long as they can't explicitly identify a reason that another candidate is clearly better across all measures.

by pc86 3mo ago

intrasight 3mo ago

That would indeed solve many problems. It would also focus legislative minds now and in the future. Not sure it would be beneficial for the judicial branch. Also beneficial perhaps would be to have it be necessary that the law spells out the technical implementation. Sort of like patents do.

goalieca 3mo ago

I remember the patriot act.

pc86 3mo ago
In this very comment I started talking about the patriot act two or three times but kept deleting it because I didn't want to ramble. But yeah that's exactly what I was thinking of - for people who care about privacy and freedom it was really one of the worst pieces of legislation in modern US history, and permanently changed the country for the worse.
hvs 3mo ago
The Patriot Act is perfect example of the adage, "Never let a crisis go to waste."
- wartywhoa23 3mo ago
  Or rather "Always construct crises proportionate to the desired delta of the current Overton window's position".
  - pc86 3mo ago
    Ah yes, that old adage :)

abecedarius 3mo ago

Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention: > I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it? https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
Add money to politics - more accurately add even more money to politics - and see how this works out.
- abecedarius 3mo ago
  Concentrated interests want legislation favoring them at the expense of the easily-misled public. So what's your model by which repeal becoming less near-impossible makes the net damage from this dynamic greater.
afiori 3mo ago
This looks like something only a libertarian would like
NoMoreNicksLeft 3mo ago
>Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention: There's an interesting, one-time shakeup that we could actually accomplish. While it's true that there will never again be another constitutional amendment... there's already one out there that will never expire, partially ratified. Completely beyond Congress's ability to rescind it or cockblock it. Article the First. Were it to be ratified, nearly immediately (whenever the next Census is), the House of Representatives has over 6000 seats. So many that the existing party apparatus wouldn't be able to vet candidates or manipulate. Lobbyists, even, would have a hard time allotting the slush funds to bribe them all. And what would it take to do all of this? Maybe 10 or 12 people hammering (gently) on some state legislator in Nevada or Kansas. Convince him or her to pass the resolution to ratify. Nothing more than that. A single state even attempting to ratify it would start the ball rolling, and no one would be able to stop it.

thesz 3mo ago

> Every law should have an automatic sunset period of 1-10 years that requires it to pass the entire legislative process again, or at least both full chambers + signing. Then you will have a lot of Constitution amendments. That's first. The burden of ever-changing law landscape will be carried by ordinary people, not by legislators. That's second.

pc86 3mo ago
> Then you will have a lot of Constitution amendments. You say that like it's a bad thing? > The burden of ever-changing law landscape will be carried by ordinary people, not by legislators. The "burden" would also include, for the most part, being able to look up at any given point in time whether something violated the law without referring to hundreds of thousands of pages of other codes, administrative law, and agency rules.
- thesz 3mo ago
  > You say that like it's a bad thing? I am saying that politicians will get around the sunsetting rule, if any, that's first. Constitution, then, will serve as what regular law does right now, without anything that makes something Constitution. That's second. I also am strongly suspecting that hundredths of thousands of pages of codes and laws will not get leaner at all. There is no point in ceding regulatory capture, because the capability to capture regulations is the point of governance, as I see it.

flumes_whims_ 3mo ago

In the saga period of Iceland, 1/3rd of the laws had to be recited orally each year in a public assembly. If we had something like that then our legal code would be a lot slimmer.

mycall 3mo ago
Slim is not always better once people find exploits and loopholes which helps them but hurts society at large. Sunsetting is better.
- sylos 3mo ago
  But clearly what's going on now with omnibus bills that no one has read in its entirety are ok?

Terr_ 3mo ago

> automatic sunset period That's attacking the symptom rather than the cause. The deeper issue is that the legislature is not responsive to the people who don't actually want X anymore. Instead, how about: 1. Replace plurality votes and single-primaries with some form of ranked-choice voting. This reduces the spoiler effect and makes it easier for people to organize around their real priorities. 2. Remove the hard-cap on the House of Representatives, peg it to a number of constituents, and let them meet and vote virtually. 3. Instead of a single "winner takes all" for one region (much smaller regions, if the House is uncapped) allow multiple proportional winners for a moderate region. 4. It's not possible to amend how the Senate seats are per-state, but we can at least make it easier for large States to fission if they decide those rules are screwing over their residents. (Subject to conditions conditions I won't bore you with here. Yet.)

krferriter 3mo ago

> Every law should have The problem is that there isn't really this clean discrete sense of 'a law'. There is the federal code, and the federal register, and bills or rules enacted over time which amend those things. Often times those bills are collections of amendments which do things like add a phrase or swap out a word or add a bullet point to a list. They're like diffs. You can't just have those things sunset individually or you end up with a incoherent code and you end up creating a state of the code which is not what was intended by anyone, at any point along the way. And these can be significant things, like a substantial bill which makes a significant change to federal law may be just like adding a bullet point to a couple lists, or adding a parenthetical to a paragraph. If you make it so all of the federal code and register has to be voted on every 1-10 years, then you'll just make it so everyone always votes to pass all of it, because no one is sitting down and reading all of it, because almost no one even sits down to read all the bills proposed in a year, which are much smaller in text volume. The real underlying problem is that legislators are not responsive to the demands of their constituents. Ideas which have supermajority support among the public are not valued or prioritized. And none of the legislators suffer for it, because the elections are not generally competitive among candidates who understand policymaking, and there is a strong incumbency bias where people just vote for the person they recognize as long as they don't have major complaints and as long as they can't explicitly identify a reason that another candidate is clearly better across all measures.