71–80 of 129 posts
Proposed constitutional amendment: Within 30 days after a bill is made law, legislators that voted must pass an automatically generated comprehension test of the legislation at a 6th grade level. On failure they lose voting privileges for 90 days. On three strikes they leave office and a new election for that seat is called.
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In a former job I worked on a tech co's policy response to a major piece of California AI legislation a couple of years ago and was stunned to learn that nonprofits (at least, I'd be shocked if this didn't also include companies) basically sponsor bills and just find lawmakers to introduce and champion them.
Many Judicial opinions are done in the same manner. An attorney from the winning side prepares a draft opinion and a judge reviews/edits it and away it goes. The edits in the couple I've personally seen are incredibly light - more or less a rubber stamp with the judge's name on it. I imagine this holds true (via chatting with insider friends) for many such "industries" including lawmaking, scientific/academic papers,…
this claim is utter fiction, your extraordinary claim requires evidence
Broken country with a broken governments all the way down. It's clearly common practise to pass bills without knowing what they contain. Horrible.
I find the fact that nobody seems to know how those names got into the bill particularly frustrating. Lawmakers really need to learn to use version tracking properly. It's shouldn't be possible for a single line of text to make it into a bill without a digital trail leading back to whoever added it.
I don’t want to pick on you specifically, because this is just one example of a very common pathology, but this is such an “HN-brained” comment. “They didn’t use version control” is ten million miles from the real problem here, and adopting version control would improve literally nothing about this situation.
You can track changes, and diff, and blame.
Wouldn't solve the corruption in this case but could definitely shine a light on it.
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I deliberately didn't say version control (which would imply git or similar, and we know they're not going to learn that). I said version tracking. They use word processors to write the things, they could at least learn to turn on "track changes". I genuinely do believe that a law that says "all laws must be able to show author tracking on a per-line basis" would improve democracy. Convince me otherwise!
Enabling version tracking would not be any different from learning Git if both require passing a law. The real problem is that those people are clueless and there is no one to guide them. It's probably a decent startup idea, software for lawmakers.
Why? Because:
1. They’d never enable it for the final bill and thus all prior changes would fall under legislative privilege and thus the public would never see it.
2. Government moves slowly and isn’t generally apt to adopt technology as rapidly as they should. The workflows would need to change significantly and that would be impossible/take an inordinate amount of time. But; see #1.
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I went through a long and arduous legal process as part of my divorce. While my attorney preferred sharing redlines, the other attorney never shared it back that way, or even in a Word doc; they always sent PDF images.
Based on how many times we redlined stuff and the other side would just treat it as if it hadn’t happened was absurd. If this sort of behavior is entrenched in the legal field, I can’t imagine it would ever work when attorneys, governments, and industry players are involved.
My interpretation of what happened here is that a legislator who opposed the bill inserted the names of the lobbyists as a joke against the bill, which has now paid off. The article says that the original list did not include the names, they were added during the legislative amendment process by a legislator. While corporate authorship of bills is a concern, I don’t think this particular mishap is a direct result of…
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I'm not sure this is true. I've payed attention to a few high profile cases and I've not seen anything like that come up. The closest I can think of is when jury instructions are issued. But in that, the two sides ultimately work with the court to hammer out the details of how those instructions should look. And often, they are based on a more or less standard template with minor revisions.
I was watching the Abrego Garcia case. It was done routinely by Garcia's lawyer. They would write an order for the judge to sign then ask them to sign it.
Generally speaking, an attorney can make a request for a ruling by the judge and the other side can oppose it. However, beyond just citing relevant case law there wouldn't be anything that could be copied verbatim by a judge.
There should be relevant court filings that show what you are saying happen. Do you have them?
Broken country with a broken governments all the way down. It's clearly common practise to pass bills without knowing what they contain. Horrible.
None of it makes any fucking sense. The fact things wrapped up in mega bills basically breaks any semblance of a democratic system; either you vote for the entire package, or the entire government breaks, or your competitor gets to slam you for hating on the children because you had to defund them in order to avoid doing some other terrible thing.
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Enabling version tracking would not be any different from learning Git if both require passing a law. The real problem is that those people are clueless and there is no one to guide them. It's probably a decent startup idea, software for lawmakers.
While that may be true, software for this would never become commonplace nor useful. Why? Because: 1. They’d never enable it for the final bill and thus all prior changes would fall under legislative privilege and thus the public would never see it. 2. Government moves slowly and isn’t generally apt to adopt technology as rapidly as they should. The workflows would need to change significantly and that would be impos…
But you are right, and that's what I am saying. The government will never become better on its own. You would need to take its hand and keep holding it forever, or it will get lost.
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> Lawmakers really need to learn to use version tracking properly Not how reconciliation-based negotiations work. Behind every material lawmaker you’d have redlines circulating among their staff. Each industry group would have them circulating among its members. Each citizen group, too. These will be haphazardly combined among the groups, sometimes transparently, sometimes strategically. It’s still traceable. But not…
Even being able to credit a line to an individual lawmaker's office would be better than what we have now.
It looks like North Dakota uses a LegCo. If the edits were in the original draft, no lawmaker added them.