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I have a dumb question: If the United States Code is the authoritative law, what stops someone from finding some esoteric statute they want to change, and just

I have a dumb question: If the United States Code is the authoritative law, what stops someone from finding some esoteric statute they want to change, and just publishing it differently than what the original legislation says? It's not as if Congress goes back through it to make sure that no one slipped in a doozy. And I know Congress could, if they caught wind of such trickery, pass yet more legislation to undo that, but given how onerous and slow-moving that process is, it could be years before it was fixed. These dumb assholes need to start using git.

joshdata 12y ago
Only half of the US Code is authoritative (so called 'positive law titles'). For the rest, the original statutes are authoritative. For the authoritative part- Congress isn't the only stakeholder who wants to see the law published correctly, fortunately. Businesses, lawyers, federal agencies, and others are looking over the US Code as it is published. In many ways it's like the open source model: many eyes and many copies (e.g. in libraries) keep it safe. The law is 200+ years old, though, so we're still stuck with old-timey ways of doing it for now. Congress is very quickly modernizing now. They recently converted the US Code into very good XML: http://uscode.house.gov/download/download.shtml http://uscode.house.gov/download/download.shtml. Anyone could copy it into github or run it through diff to see changes.