Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand
#2Some people, when they find legislation hard to understand, think "I know, let's legislate to make legislation easier to understand." Now they have two problems.
Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand
#3Bills are a lot easier to understand if you think of them as source code diffs. This bill is basically requiring them to provide context diffs which is actually a pretty decent idea.
Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand
#4Some people, when they find legislation hard to understand, think "I know, let's legislate to make legislation easier to understand." Now they have two problems.
I think you might not have read the article, because the proposal is rather simple and reasonable.
Laws are often written with links to other laws that are required to understand them. Some laws are even "diffs" of other laws: "Paragraph 5 in law 65/1996 is removed, and the following paragraph is added instead: blah blah".* This means that you often need to open four or five different documents to understand a single law.
The proposal seems aimed at doing away with the links and the diffs, which sounds very reasonable.
*Note: the example is based on my country's laws (I'm not from the US so I don't read US laws), but judging from the content of the article, it seems like US laws have the same problem.
Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand
#5Bills are a lot easier to understand if you think of them as source code diffs. This bill is basically requiring them to provide context diffs which is actually a pretty decent idea.
They should just make a law that requires all legislation to be hosted publicly on github.
Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand
#6This is my congressman. Here's why he's interesting:
He doesn't miss any votes, and he explains every single vote (even boring, inconsequential votes) on his Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/repjustinamash
Here's an example of a boring explanation:
https://www.facebook.com/repjustinamash/posts/51291397874801...
Here's a longer explanation:
https://www.facebook.com/repjustinamash/posts/51246580545949...
Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand
#7The Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress already does this. In fact, it's what this particular agency was created to do.
Maybe Rep. Amash should spend more time learning about existing resources and less time passing redundant laws?
Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand
#8Minor point: Absent a constitutional amendment, I don't think the bill would be legally binding (it could, of course, establish a social norm within the Congress, enforceable by peer pressure).
Suppose that a senator or representative were to introduce a bill that didn't conform to the diff requirement. Suppose also that both houses passed the bill, and the president signed it. I don't think anyone would argue that the bill hadn't become law.
Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand
#9Some people, when they find legislation hard to understand, think "I know, let's legislate to make legislation easier to understand." Now they have two problems.
I think you might not have read the article, because the proposal is rather simple and reasonable. Laws are often written with links to other laws that are required to understand them. Some laws are even "diffs" of other laws: "Paragraph 5 in law 65/1996 is removed, and the following paragraph is added instead: blah blah".* This means that you often need to open four or five different documents to understand a single…
In the US, the current published version of a law reflects all legislative amendments to it.
The problem is finding historical versions of the law, which usually requires historical lawbooks or access to expensive legal databases like Westlaw or Lexis which maintain historical versions of state and federal laws.
Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand
#10Minor point: Absent a constitutional amendment, I don't think the bill would be legally binding (it could, of course, establish a social norm within the Congress, enforceable by peer pressure). Suppose that a senator or representative were to introduce a bill that didn't conform to the diff requirement. Suppose also that both houses passed the bill, and the president signed it. I don't think anyone would argue that t…
Yup. "Congress cannot bind future Congresses" and all that. Basically any "I want to change the way Washington works!" movement is so much circle-jerking for this reason.