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Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand

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Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand

#11

Post by gizmo686 »

gamblor956 wrote: post #7

The 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?

As an not very politically active person, when I go to look up laws, I am confronted by the reference problem this bill is designed to solve. Furthermore, this bill can essentially be viewed as Congress slightly modifying their own operating procedure to make things easier for themselves (and others). They are probably the only entity in the US that needs to pass a law to change how they format documents.

Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand

#12

Post by gizmo686 »

gamblor956 wrote: post #9
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem that this bill is trying to solve is in reading proposed amendments. Once an amendment passes, then we can simply look at the running copy of the main law. But, if you are trying to decide if we should pass an amendment, you (under the current system) must cross reference to every law mentioned in order to simply understand what the bill you are considering does.

Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand

#13

Post by adestefan »

gizmo686 wrote: post #11
gamblor956 wrote: post #7

The 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?

As an not very politically active person, when I go to look up laws, I am confronted by the reference problem this bill is designed to solve. Furthermore, this bill can essentially be viewed as Congress slightly modifying their own operating procedure to make things easier for themselves (and others). They are probably the only entity in the US that needs to pass a law to change how they format documents.

Every Congress has the ability to change any rule about how they work before the session starts.

Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand

#14

Post by theevocater »

Isn't this more the arena of a procedural than federal law? This definitely seems more feel good than reality. I believe the court precedent is called "legislative entrenchment"[1] which seems to prevent Congress from passing these laws that "bind" future Congresses.

So, to answer the Representative's question, it would appear that courts would hold this bill unconstitutional.

[1] http://www.yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-journal/essay/leg...

Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand

#15

Post by cpleppert »

rayiner wrote: post #3

Bills 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.

I understand the motivation but it doesn't work. The problem isn't people don't understand how a bill was made it is that they do not care what is in the bill. It isn't rocket science finding out who inserted what in a bill. Every time some piece of pork or special interest group gets something good the collective response is to shrug. No one cares.

You actually want people suggesting changes to bills at the committee stage. What happens now is that bills are written by committee members based on broad directions from leadership. The first time the bill is seen everything in the bill has been baked in the oven so to speak. What you are suggesting will drive bill making process even more underground as members are scared of suggesting unpopular changes to bills they actually support.

Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand

#16

Post by cpleppert »

dctoedt wrote: post #8

Minor 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…

Yes this is constitutional. The houses can modify their procedure through a public law. This happened in the sequester bill that established the super committee and forced an up or down vote on the debt reduction proposal. If it wasn't reconciliation would have been illegal for the past fifty years.

Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand

#18

Post by jellicle »

Legislatures run mainly on norms and customs. As people have pointed out already, no legislature can bind a future version of itself (which is why the 60-vote filibuster is unconstitutional, but I digress).

Congress could establish better customs, of course. It is customary in many nations to limit legislation to a single topic and to codify the laws on a single topic in a single published Act. For example, virtually all of the important laws relating to, say, education, might be published in an Education Act, and from time to time, a legislature would enact a new version of it, replacing the old version entirely.

This tends to make reading up on the laws (and proposed laws) much easier, and it also makes super-specific tax breaks for individual companies and things like that really stand out.

The U.S. custom of publishing bills as a list of "replace "and" in line 76422 with "or"" statements is a really poor legislative custom.

Re: Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand

#19

Post by cpleppert »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #4
voyou wrote: post #2

Some 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…

From the article:

‘‘No Act shall be revised or amended by mere reference to it. Every bill or joint resolution which amends an existing section, subsection, or other subdivision of any Act shall set forth the section, subsection, or other subdivision sufficiently to enable the intent and effect of the bill or joint resolution to be clearly understood," the two-page bill states.

First of all, any bill that can't be understood will be struck down by the courts immediately. The "clearly understood" provision violates the principle that legislation will be precise. If the legislation lays out a supplementary principle that serves to explain it then it can't be enforced in court so it absolutely meaningless.

Congress already lays out why it passes bills in introductions. This is a political stunt and nothing more.

Law is by its very nature hard to understand especially in a common law system like ours based on precedents. There is no easy way to allow citizens to understand the law. It would be great if you could go online and clearly see

1)what the law is and sections have changed over time 2) which law led to which changes in the published statute and see how that law changed other sections

I'm working on something like that right now. Please keep in mind that making the law more accessible doesn't make it easier to understand. There are so many terms embedded in the law and the courts may not have a clear interpretation of the language yet; or different circuits have different precedents.

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